


The Age of Assassins

by blackwingedheaven



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Fanfiction, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 00:37:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 86,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15012869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackwingedheaven/pseuds/blackwingedheaven
Summary: Aventus Aretino has left Dawnstar Sanctuary behind to train as a bard in Solitude. His new life brings with it new challenges and new difficulties-but also new opportunities. The Age of Assassins has begun. Set in the same continuity asHeiwako's storiesincluding "Darkness Rises When Silence Dies" and "For the Future of Skyrim." Skyrim is copyright Bethesda. Review please!This fiction is a sequel to my previous story,Innocence Lost.





	1. The New Kid

Chapter 1: The New Kid

I was just getting settled into my new room when I heard the door open behind me. Looking back, I saw the browned face of a Redguard boy, maybe a year or two older than me. He wore the good-quality Imperial-style tunic and trousers that were common in the city of Solitude, and he was carrying a lute under one arm. We stared at each other in surprise for a moment, the corner of a bedsheet in my hand, until he finally stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

"You'll have to forgive my surprise," he said with a slight smile, putting his lute down on the desk next to his bed. "I didn't realize that I was getting a roommate."

"Yeah," I responded, "sorry about that. I just got here this morning, and things have been a little crazy."

"I imagine that it must have been. Crazy, I mean. Everyone else has been moved in for days, and classes start tomorrow."

"If I could have gotten here any sooner, I would have," I offered. "The roads have just been bad, what with the civil war and all." I extended a hand in friendship, hoping to salvage what was left of a first impression, and I was grateful when he took it.

"Ataf," he finally said by way of introduction. "I'm the youngest bard at the college."

"Probably not anymore," I laughed. "The name's Aventus. Aventus Aretino. I'm fourteen."

"Seriously?" he asked, looking me up and down. "I would have guessed you were at least a year older than me." He paused for a moment. "Or that you were a Nord."

"Imperial, I'm afraid," I replied. I took the opportunity to sit down on the edge of my bed so that I wasn't looming over Ataf. "Originally from Windhelm, though."

"That would be why you're 'afraid' of being an Imperial then," he smiled, leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed. "You seem like an interesting person, Aventus Aretino. Fourteen years old and accepted into one of the most prestigious schools in Skyrim. An Imperial from Ulfric Stormcloak's capital living in the heart of the Empire's power. Willing to brave the roads during a civil war just to come to school. I'd love to hear your story."

"No, you wouldn't," I said more seriously than I intended. When Ataf looked at me strangely, I laughed and rubbed the back of my head nervously. "I just mean that I'm more boring than you're making me out to be. There's nothing unusual about me."

"I somehow doubt that," Ataf smirked.

"Really," I insisted. "I'm nothing special."

As the walls of Solitude came into view on an early morning on the first of Hearthfire, I sighed.

"What's wrong, sweety?" Hecate asked.

"I can't believe I have to go two years without killing anyone," I complained.

"Aww," she said with mock sympathy. "Sorry, hon. Maybe we can work in a contract killing on your spring break or something."

"Really?" I asked hopefully. I looked back up at the outline of the Empire's stronghold in Skyrim, a slight smile playing on my face. "That would be swell."

We were riding side by side on the driver's seat of a wagon with most of my worldly possessions in the back, along well as a full-grown ice wolf named Pavot. I looked over at her, marveling at the transformation that had occurred on the road between Dawnstar and Solitude. She was always beautiful—long, dark hair, ocean-blue eyes, and a tanned complexion that spoke to both her Imperial heritage and her love of sunbathing—but as Hecate, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, she usually had a dangerous look about her. She preferred clothes that were easy to move in, since she was an archer by training, but would occasionally dress in the black-and-red leathers of the Brotherhood.

Right now, she had her hair up in a double-braid that had its loose ends pinned to the back of her head. The effect took ten years off her face—and she already looked younger than her thirty-five years. She was wearing a stylish traveling dress in a blue-green color that made her eyes sparkle. Her daedric bow, the lethal weapon she called Styx, was nowhere to be seen. She could have easily passed for my older sister rather than my mother, a cover story that I still wasn't entirely comfortable with, given some of my feelings toward her.

Not that she had ever noticed them in the slightest.

"Hecate-" I started.

"Diana," she interrupted. "You have to remember to call me 'Diana' while we're in public from now on."

I sighed to myself, more quietly this time. I was terrible with cover identities, let alone multiple persistent ones. It was why Hecate—or Diana, rather—had enrolled me in the Bards College of Solitude under my own name. It was a risk if I were to ever be associated with the Dark Brotherhood, but I was far better at concealment and stealth than I was at verbal deceptions. Training me in such delicate arts was one of the reasons that Diana had wanted me to become a bard in the first place. She felt that it would be a good learning experience.

Still, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. After all, I was the youngest member of the Dark Brotherhood—an elite order of assassins in the service of Sithis, the Dread Lord of the Void, and of his envoy, the Night Mother. Our blades drank the blood of the wicked, exacting holy vengeance for those desperate enough to enact the Black Sacrament. In my two years with the Brotherhood, I had killed over a dozen men and women, earned more money than many citizens would see in a decade, and honed my body into a living weapon.

Now I was being sent away—away from the family and the profession I had come to love—to sit around with a bunch of lute-playing milk-drinkers for two years.

Looking back at Diana, I realized that I would have done far worse just for her asking.

"Diana," I said, carefully emphasizing the name, "are you sure I have to go with you to the Blue Palace? Wouldn't it be better if I just settled in to the college?"

"Absolutely not," she replied firmly. "Elisif the Fair is an old friend of mine, and she's dying to meet you."

Diana looked like she was less than excited about the whole thing too and just trying to put on a cheerful disposition about it. I knew that she hadn't wanted the two of us to be linked publicly—it was just too much of a risk to the Brotherhood—but when she enrolled me into the Bards College, she had been required to come up with a reason to be interested in my well-being for Viarmo, the headmaster. The quickest lie she had been able to come up with was that I was her adopted son.

And this was where things went out of control.

As Ulfric Stormcloak's rebellion had pressed ever closer to the Imperial holdings in the west of Skyrim, things in Solitude had become more desperate. When the news that Ulfric had recruited the Dragonborn, legendary savior of the world, to his cause… Well, Elisif had apparently taken the news poorly. The Dragonborn had been a close personal friend of hers, and the news that the woman she admired and respected had sided with her husband's murderer had left her inconsolable.

The Dragonborn—a woman named Diana. Who was riding with me toward Solitude. Who had taken the name Hecate when she had forsaken her heroic status to become the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood.

The problem here should be apparent.

Well, Hecate had visited Solitude a while back, run into Elisif by accident, and explained away her two-year absence with a lie about being married and settling down. She had assured the fair widow that she had not, in fact, joined up with the Stormcloak Rebellion and was simply trying to live a quiet life. The truth would have been even worse. The knowledge that Ulfric's "Dragonborn" was a pretender had comforted the young widow, and Hecate had been willing to leave it at that.

Unfortunately, as headmaster of the Bards College, Viarmo was in frequent contact with Elisif. At some point, the two of them had compared stories and realized that Diana the Dragonborn had adopted a son—who she now wanted to enroll in the Bards College. Everything had snowballed from there. Now, Diana was virtually obligated to make an appearance at the Blue Palace, the seat of Jarl Elisif's power, and formally present me to her court. Moreover, the "false" Dragonborn had demonstrated an actual ability to use the thu'um—the power that men sometimes called Shouting—which made Diana's return to the public life a necessity.

This was why I hated lying. I just preferred to kill people.

Once Ataf sat down, I stood back up to continue putting away my things. My room at the Bards College was smaller than the room I had slept in back at Dawnstar Sanctuary, but more private. One roommate was less than I usually had, since only the highest-ranking members of the Dark Brotherhood had private sleeping quarters. The rest of us shared a common sleeping room, living shoulder-to-shoulder as a family, if occasionally a dysfunctional one.

I walked over to where Hecate had left my traveling trunk and bent down to move it to the end of my bed. My back suddenly flared with pain, and I saw stars. I must have blacked out for a second, because Ataf was suddenly next to me, steadying me by holding onto my shoulder.

"By the Divines," he cursed. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," I managed to gasp before sitting down heavily on the edge of the trunk. I was so used to doing for myself that I had managed to forget that I was still recovering.

A few weeks ago, I had been on contract out near Falkreath when things went terribly wrong. I had wound up with extensive injuries, including cuts and bruises, cracked ribs, and a sprained back. Honestly, I was lucky to have survived. I hadn't fully recovered when the deadline for school came around, so Hecate had risked us traveling while I was still healing. It hadn't been too bad for the most part, but trying to lift my chest on my own had been a sharp, painful reminder of my continuing state of reduced strength.

"Maybe I should get a teacher…" Ataf said nervously. I must have looked even worse than I felt.

"No," I insisted, a little more steadily. "It's nothing serious." I stood up, my knees shaking more than I would have liked. "See, I'm fine now."

"What was that?" he asked. "You looked like you were stabbed in the gut."

"Oh, I fell off a horse a few days ago," I lied. "Bruised my back and ribs, but nothing too serious."

"Well, you should take better care of yourself," Ataf chided. "Let me help you move your trunk."

"I appreciate the help," I smiled.

Working together, the two of us managed to move the heavy chest into place at the foot of my bed, though I was sweating and shaking by the end of it. Ataf looked a little winded himself.

"How in Oblivion did you even get this thing in here?" he asked when we were done.

"My… mother… had some of the staff bring it in," I told him. "I would have had them put it where it belongs if I had been here, but she insisted that I come with her on business while they got our things put away."

"Your mother has business in the capital?" Ataf asked, the inquisitive gleam returning to his eye.

I sighed, rubbing my forehead. This was going to be a long two years.

After dropping off our wagon at the Bards College, Hecate and I had walked down a few blocks to her house in Solitude, Proudspire Manor. It was conveniently located less than a five minute walk from the college, situated in a very upscale residential neighborhood that housed some of Solitude's most prominent citizens. Proudspire Manor shared a walkway between its front door and the door of another, similarly sized mansion, a style of connected homes that seemed common in this part of the city.

As we approached the manor house, Hecate's face suddenly went tight and drawn. I followed her gaze to the front door of the opposing home, which stood slightly open.

"What's wrong?" I asked her.

"That house…" she said nervously. "I didn't think anyone was living there."

"Did you know the previous resident?" I asked.

"Only a little," Hecate responded. "I was a guest at her wedding."

Before she could explain any further, a Dunmer woman wearing the heavy armor of a warrior came through the open doorway. Hecate's eyes widened in recognition, as did the Dunmer's eyes when she glanced our way.

"Dragonborn," said the Dark Elf with a slight nod.

"A pleasure as always, Irileth," she responded, using the lighter tone she normally adopted when she was being Diana. "I take it Jarl Balgruuf is around."

"His lordship has already been escorted to the Blue Palace for the morning court," she responded airily. I got the impression she didn't like Hecate very much. "He asked me to come back and get his children ready."

"I thought you housecarls never left your jarl's side," Hecate snarked.

"Normally, I wouldn't," Irileth growled. "But Balgruuf's children take forever to get ready in the mornings."

"No, Irileth," responded a young man with a pleasant smile as he ducked between the doorframe and the glowering housecarl. "Dagny takes forever to get ready in the mornings. The rest of us have slightly more reasonable grooming times." He turned to look at Hecate and nodded. "Hello, Diana. I haven't seen you in a while."

"Frothar?" she asked. "I barely recognized you. You've gotten big."

I took a moment to appraise Balgruuf's son. He was almost as tall as me, but broader-shouldered. I guessed that he was perhaps two or three years my senior. He had dark brown hair tied back in a loose ponytail and was clean-shaven. All in all, he was passably handsome, but it was his clothing that made me feel like a backwater nobody more than his looks. I felt like a grimy peasant in my rough riding leathers; Frothar was immaculately dressed in the latest Solitude fashions, a dark-blue doublet and leather pants with a short jacket and fur-lined cloak. At his side was a gleaming, oiled scabbard with the jeweled hilt of a dueling sword sticking up from it.

The clothing transformed him from a good-looking boy to a prince. I couldn't help but feel a little envious. While I had finally come to understand that I wasn't bad-looking, I felt that I had a forgettable face. It helped as an assassin, but it also meant that there was less there to accentuate. On the few occasions I had been required to adopt a disguise for a contract, I found that wearing fancy clothes just made me look silly.

"Father will be happy to see you," he continued, paying me no attention at all.

"As I will to see him," Hecate responded.

"Dagny's almost ready," came a sullen voice from behind Irileth. She stood aside to make room for another teenaged boy, this one my age or perhaps a year or so younger. He was shorter than his brother, and darker of hair and eye. His hair was almost as long as Frothar's but worn loose and messy. From the heavy bags under his eyes, he looked like he hadn't slept very well—in years. He was not as well-dressed as his brother, but if it hadn't been for the tired eyes and the vaguely annoyed expression, he would have been significantly more handsome.

"Thank you, Nelkir," Irileth said, then leaned in through the doorway. "Dagny!" she shouted. "We're leaving!" I couldn't hear whatever response might have come, but Irileth paused for a moment before shouting again. "Then leave it! You don't need two of them!"

Heavy footsteps pounded through the house, loud enough that I could hear them from outside, and then a girl came stomping out onto the portico, nearly barreling into Irileth and her brothers before coming to a stop. Her hair was a dark-blonde color, pulled back into a single heavy braid that fell past her hips. Her dress was a dark blue that complemented her older brother's doublet, accented with lighter blue ribbons and a blue-grey sash. I could only describe her as "chubby." She wasn't fat—just soft all over, like she had never lost her baby fat after hitting her growth spurt. Though she was shorter than both of her brothers, she was clearly the middle child.

"Why the rush, Irileth?" she asked haughtily. "It's not like Daddy is going to have time for us with all of the war councils going on."

"It's important that we're with Father as much as possible," Frothar chastised. "He needs us near right now."

"You mean important for his image," Nelkir groused as Irileth locked up behind them.

"Please, children," Irileth sighed as she turned back to them. "Let's not argue in front of the Dragonborn."

"Oh, gracious!" Dagny exclaimed, finally looking our way. "I hadn't realized that we had guests."

"Neighbors, actually," Hecate responded. "I hadn't been aware that Jarl Balgruuf had moved in next door to me."

"It's not like you're in Solitude very often, Diana," Frothar teased.

"Hopefully that will change now," she responded solemnly. "We're stopping in at Proudspire to change clothes and freshen up before I speak to Jarl Elisif."

"We?" asked Dagny, looking over at me. Her expression said that she had seen better-looking skeevers than me. "Who's your squire?"

"My son," she said, then coughed to stifle a laugh when Dagny and Irileth's eyes bulged. I smiled too, trying to keep a pleasant face. "I had hoped to introduce him at court today, but I suppose you all get a special preview. Aventus, it's my honor to introduce the children of Jarl Balgruuf the Greater: Frothar, Dagny, and Nelkir. Also," she indicated the Dunmer woman, "this is Irileth, Balgruuf's housecarl."

Frothar strode down off the portico to us and extended a hand to me in friendship. I took it gladly, though I was a little put off when he leaned in and hugged me too. I knew that Nords traditionally exchanged embraces instead of handshakes, but it was more physical contact than I was used to from the Brotherhood.

"I wasn't aware you had a son," Irileth said suspiciously.

"I'm adopted," I offered over Frothar's shoulder. Dagny's face immediately became less interested. "My birth parents died when I was little. Diana was kind enough to take me in and give me a home."

"Don't let Irileth or my sister get to you, Aventus," Frothar said after he released me from his powerful grip. "Irileth is always sour, and Dagny's just upset that there weren't any sweetrolls left in the house this morning."

"At least you can get a decent sweetroll in Solitude," she sniffed. "Unlike Whiterun."

At the mention of Whiterun, Frothar's good humor seemed to vanish, and Nelkir's face became even darker. Irileth locked the door to their manor with a snap and turned on her heel. Dagny seemed to realize that she had said something unpleasant and walked away from the housecarl. She barely gave me a glance as she flounced past me. Nelkir quietly trailed behind her, though he gave me a slight nod as he went.

"I suppose we'll see you both at the Blue Palace," Frothar offered as he moved to join his siblings. Irileth came up behind them, nodding respectfully to Hecate as she passed.

"Seeing those three makes me feel old," Hecate sighed once they were a good way down the street.

"What about seeing me?" I joked.

"You'll always be my little boy," she smiled, not realizing how much that statement pained me.

Ataf had finally gone out for the evening, leaving me to rest in our shared room. Mostly, I was tired from all of the questions that Ataf had asked me while I was settling in, rather than weary from the trip. Hopefully, my roommate's enthusiasm on the topic of me would die down in a day or two, once I emphasized to him exactly how totally dull and normal I was.

After Ataf had been gone for a few minutes, I locked the door to the room. He had a key, naturally, but I would hear him if he tried to unlock it, which was the important thing. It was time to look through my things and see what presents my family had sent along to keep me occupied in my exile. I wasn't supposed to be taking contracts while I was at school, so I doubted it would be anything interesting.

When I opened up my traveling trunk, I was pleasantly surprised.

Beneath the several outfits of decent clothing, extra boots, personal supplies, and a couple of blankets was a hidden catch that unlocked a panel from the bottom of the trunk. Lifting the panel revealed nothing at all—only a couple of inches of space where one might hide a journal or coins. I decided that I should probably mock up a fake diary and put a few septims in here to make it look more authentic.

The truth is, most people didn't snoop at all—and the ones that do normally stop when they find something that's been hidden. They rarely suspect a second layer of secrecy.

I felt around the edges of the hidden space and found the four recessed buttons that unlocked the real hiding spot. Once all four were depressed, a drawer popped out of the front of the chest along the bottom, so subtly that I had to grab the edge of it with my fingernails to get it moving. It was about six inches deep and ran the width and length of the chest. As I pulled it out, I whistled softly in appreciation for Nazir's planning skills.

The drawer was covered by a thin layer of wrinkled felt, making it look like an empty chamber at first glance. Lifting it up revealed a cache of weapons and my personal suit of Dark Brotherhood armor—red and black, with a cowled mask to conceal an assassin's identity. I traced my fingers along the black hand symbol emblazoned on its chest, feeling a surge of pride. Laid into shaped grooves on either side of the armor were the tools of my trade: a garrote, a brace of throwing knives, a chisel-tipped dagger used for puncturing armor, and a dozen vials of poison and potions, all carefully labeled. I made a mental note to send a nice thank-you letter to Babette.

The only objects I didn't recognize were wrapped in cloth. When I unwrapped them, I found a note, written in Nazir's tight, neat script, saying only "For Aventus: Practice!" Situated under the note was a pair of gloves—heavily padded, with multiple bracing straps, and riveted metal strips along the knuckles and top of the hand. I pulled them on to find that they were heavier than they looked; I guessed that the metal was ebony from its weight and color. When I tried an experimental punch with them, I was surprised at the way the gloves increased the force of my swing. I smiled, recognizing their purpose. Nazir was always complaining that I needed to improve my hand-to-hand skills, so I supposed this was his way of giving me a little nudge.

When I looked back into the chest, I noticed that there had been one last thing tucked under the gauntlets. It was a metal cylinder a little longer than my hand with a catch along one side and a weighted knob on the top. The whole thing was much heavier than it looked. I pushed the catch but nothing happened. I tried swinging it around a couple of times, expecting some sort of result only to be disappointed. I was starting to get frustrated until I decided to push the catch and swing it at the same time.

As I did, the weighted knob extended away from the handle, nearly tripling the weapon's overall length before coming to a stop. The weapon clicked into place and I released the catch, testing its weight and heft. It was some sort of telescoping mace, collapsible to make it more easily concealed, but it was heavy enough to crush bones when swung at full force. I thumbed the catch again to collapse the mace back into its original form and smiled. On the bottom of the handle was a maker's mark, stamped into the metal—a dragon coiled into the shape of a crescent moon. It was Diana's mark, as opposed to Hecate's preference for a tragedy mask. This was a present that I could keep with me, rather than having to hide it with all of my other gear.

I tucked the collapsible mace into my belt and put everything else back, carefully folding the chest back together and relocking all of the hidden catches before putting my clothes and possessions back on top. After that was done, I unlocked the door, grateful that Ataf hadn't decided to come back while I was busy.

Now that I knew what I had to work with, I had to find a place where I could keep up with my physical training. Just because I was off the active list for the next two years was no reason to get soft. I had originally thought that I could just head over to Proudspire Manor a couple of times a week and train in the basement, but my this morning's events had disabused me of that notion.

Proudspire Manor had been a short stop for us, just long enough to change clothes into something more suitable for my presentation to the jarl of Solitude, so I hadn't gotten a real sense of the place. Most of the house seemed unfurnished, which Hecate assured me she would take care of with the jarl's steward once we were done with court matters.

Once we were cleaned and dressed, we took a short walking tour of Solitude. I couldn't deny that it was by far the most beautiful city I had ever been in. Hecate had been very disappointed when I told her about what the Stormcloaks had done to Whiterun; I had grown up in grey and gloomy Windhelm, so I was used to the Nordic aesthetic—bare stone walls and cobbled streets—but Hecate was used to the clean wooden walls of Imperial homes, adorned with paint and flowers. I imagine that Nord cities being less prone to fires than those in Cyrodiil wasn't something she cared much about.

Solitude was something entirely different, though. It combined the traditional stone buildings preferred by Nords with the smooth designs and beautiful adornments of Imperial cities. It was a true fusion of the two cultures, hovering on a promontory of stone above the Carth River delta. The city gave an impression of stability and grandeur, untouched by the civil war beyond its walls.

It was an impression only somewhat sullied by the extra-large contingent of Imperial legionnaires training in the courtyards around Castle Dour, the Empire's great fortress at the heart of the provincial capital. I could see soldiers in the segmented armor of the Legion practicing formations and drilling through the open gates that led to the castle. I started to veer toward it when Hecate took my arm and pointed us onward.

"Aren't we going to the castle?" I asked.

"No," she replied, "we're going to the palace."

"What's the difference?" I said, confused.

"A castle is a place for soldiers," she said. "A palace is a place where people actually live."

As she explained this, we rounded a corner and I suddenly realized how foolish I had been to think that someplace as dull and practical as Castle Dour could be the heart of a city like this. Stretching out onto a spur of rock hanging over the river, the sun behind it like a halo, was the Blue Palace. Though it was made of the same fitted stones as much of the city, its roofs and gables were tiled in blue slate and blue-veined marble, and its high walls were broken every few feet with huge stained-glass windows. Its arched gateway led into an interior courtyard lined with boxes filled with flowers next to clustered stones covered in moss and wrought-iron benches.

It was huge, awe-inspiring, and far too much to take in during the short walk to the doors. Guards nodded to Hecate as she passed, giving no indication that her presence here was unexpected or unwelcome. The guards wore the usual face-concealing helms of Skyrim soldiers, but their red livery was a sharp contrast to the blue and grey tunics of the Stormcloaks, with whom I was more familiar.

Inside, the Blue Palace was just as impressive. The huge windows let in natural light that gave the place an airy, open feeling, and there were potted trees and flowers everywhere. Servants moved to and fro in neatly kept uniforms, while people of importance made their way through the palace to the upper level. Hecate led me up the stairs past more guards to a high-ceilinged throne room where about a dozen people milled about, waiting to talk to the woman seated on the throne.

If the Blue Palace had been beautiful, it was a pile of mud and rocks next to its most important inhabitant. Jarl Elisif the Fair lived up to her title—and more. When I first laid eyes on her, I was literally breathless for a moment. Looking at Hecate, I could see that it was the sort of reaction that never really went away; my usually resolute Listener was almost starry-eyed while looking at the young widow. Her strawberry-blonde hair sparkled in the sunlight streaming through the windows, and her blue eyes seemed to take in the whole crowd without diminishing any person in it.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on.

"You're drooling," came a sardonic voice from behind me.

I spun, bringing up my left hand in a defensive gesture, before realizing that I wasn't in any danger from Dagny, the girl I had met earlier. I quickly brought my hand the rest of the way up to my chin and rubbed it to cover my reaction.

"Am not," I insisted, checking the corners of my mouth with my fingertips.

"Uh-huh," she snorted, crossing her arms and frowning. "Then were you just keeping your mouth open to stay cool?"

Before I could come up with a witty retort, the steward—a burly, red-haired man with an equally red beard—called out Diana's name.

"Diana!" he near-shouted across the room. The assembled crowd turned to look our way, and Dagny pulled back from me a few paces. "The Dragonborn has chosen to grace us with her presence!"

"Good to see you as always, Falk," Diana—she was Diana now, I had to remember—said, walking forward to clasp forearms with the man.

"I'm glad you chose today to visit the court," Falk rumbled. "We've got a few guests who had heard rumors about the Dragonborn siding with Ulfric Stormcloak and were looking for reassurance. I can't think of anyone better to reassure them than the Dragonborn herself."

"That can wait, Falk," came the lilting, demure voice of Elisif the Fair. "Can you at least give my old friend a moment to say hello to me?"

Falk stood aside as Diana walked up to the throne and knelt before it. I wasn't sure what to do exactly, so I just walked up as well and knelt beside her. I jumped slightly when I felt Elisif's soft hand touch my shoulder, and I nearly melted again when I looked up into her kind blue eyes.

"Always a pleasure, Jarl Elisif," Diana said softly.

"Stand, please," she insisted. I got the impression that Diana kneeling before the jarl was some sort of political maneuver, but I wasn't sure what it meant. "We're old friends, after all." Elisif looked back to me as I stood then asked Diana, "And who is this handsome young man?" I blushed at her words, and I could have sworn that I heard Dagny huff indignantly somewhere behind me.

"If it pleases you, Jarl Elisif," Diana said in a louder voice, turning slightly to take in part of the crowd as well as the jarl, "allow me to introduce my son." The crowd murmured briefly, and I felt slightly dizzy as the weight of their collective gaze fell on me. I was an assassin, used to working in the shadows—I had never been the object of such public scrutiny before.

"Diana," Elisif began, quirking an eyebrow, "I didn't realize you had a son at all, let alone one nearly full-grown. Would you mind explaining to the court?"

"As you already know," Diana replied, conceding to the request, "I had hoped to retire to anonymity after defeating Alduin. I felt that I had done more than enough for the world already."

"No one denies that, Dragonborn," Balgruuf said, stepping forward. "You saved Nirn itself from destruction. No one could have asked for more."

"Thank you, my jarl," Diana said with what sounded like real sincerity. "For the time I was… gone… I secluded myself away from the world to rest, recover, and train in the thu'um. During that time, I fell in love—had a family." This part was true, at least—though I doubted that the assembled courtiers would have been as approving if they had known that the family Diana was speaking about was the Dark Brotherhood.

"A few months before my battle with Alduin," she continued, "I had visited Windhelm to speak with Ulfric Stormcloak about possibly ending the war. He asked for my allegiance instead, and I refused it. The whole thing would have been a wasted trip, had it not been for Aventus here." She laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and I beamed at the crowd. This part was true enough too, if slightly distorted. "His parents had died, and he would have been sent to an orphanage—or worse, starved in the streets—had I not intervened."

"Diana saved my life," I added, looking down into the face of my savior. Divines, when had I become so much taller than her?

"Back in Cyrodiil, we believe that saving a life makes you responsible for it," Diana smoothly picked up from me. "Once I had taken Aventus in, I found that I couldn't bear to let him go again. My husband and I adopted him." The crowd made a polite show of gentle applause at her generosity, making me feel awkwardly like a show animal. "For the last several years, I've been trying to live a simple life out of the limelight. When I finally caught wind of the rumors of this false Dragonborn, I returned as soon as I could to put them to rest."

"And how do we know that you are the true Dragonborn," asked one of the courtiers, "and the one in Ulfric's service the false?"

"I could Shout at you if you like," Diana said dryly, drawing laughter from the court. "Honestly, though, it should be enough to know that Elisif and Balgruuf know me for the true Dragonborn. I'm sad to say that my personal armor—and my identity—was stolen by my former housecarl, Lydia of Whiterun." Balgruuf's face turned down at the mention of his traitorous housecarl. "I believe that she was manipulated into this by Ulfric Stormcloak, rather than acting out of any malice. We all know how charismatic the Bear of Eastmarch can be when he wants. Even I was nearly taken in by his act for a while."

"We have all seen the true colors of Ulfric Stormcloak," Elisif said darkly. "A real hero doesn't use a power like the thu'um to murder his king." Her face turned down, and her expression seemed to bring the whole room into shadow.

"In happier news," Falk said quickly, taking up the burden from his jarl, "now that the Dragonborn has returned to us, it is the court's honor to appoint a new housecarl to her."

"What?" asked Diana in confusion. "I didn't ask for a new housecarl."

"It wouldn't be right to let a thane of Haafingar go without a housecarl," Elisif said, recovering her composure. "Now that you'll be staying in Proudspire Manor a bit more regularly, you should have someone to protect your home."

"I defeated Alduin," Diana insisted. "I think I can run off any thieves that might bother me."

"I have no doubt of your prowess," Elisif smiled, "but you can't be expected to be at home all the time, even if you were planning to move to Solitude permanently. It is a gesture of the court's appreciation for all you have done." She leaned forward slightly and caught Diana's gaze. "It would mean a great deal to me."

"Of course, Jarl Elisif," Diana agreed, seemingly hypnotized by Elisif's big blue eyes. She shook herself out of it and sighed. "When do I get to meet this new housecarl?"

"I'm here!" I heard a chipper shout from across the room. "Over here!" I looked over to see a tall Nord woman wearing heavy armor jogging through the crowd. Whenever she bumped into someone, she would mutter a brief apology, all the while waving to Diana with one hand and occasionally jumping up to be seen over the crowd. Her hair was a shade darker than Elisif's and her eyes a darker blue. As she approached, I could see that her face was covered with a spattering of freckles. She wasn't as beautiful as the jarl, but otherwise the women were physically similar enough that I wondered if they were related.

"Diana Dragonborn," Falk rumbled, "allow me to introduce your housecarl, Jordis the Sword-Maiden."

"I'm honored to meet you, my thane," Jordis bubbled excitedly. "I'm so thrilled to be in your service!"

"Right…" Diana trailed off. She turned to the red-haired steward. "I take it you'll see to the furnishing of Proudspire Manor?"

"Of course, Dragonborn," he smiled.

With that exchange, court seemed to be breaking up for the day. Balgruuf came over and embraced Diana briefly before returning to his children. Dagny gave me a final scowl of disapproval before turning to follow her father out of the room. I wondered briefly how I had managed to offend her so badly in such a short amount of time, but quickly put it out of my head.

"I would appreciate it if Aventus' relationship to me stayed out of the public eye," Diana was saying to Elisif and Falk when I turned my attention back to them. "He's studying at the Bards College, and I don't want him to be targeted for any retribution against me."

"I understand completely," Elisif said, taking Diana's hand. "The dignitaries present today are all trustworthy-"

"Trustworthy enough," Falk interrupted with a grunt.

"And I'm sure that they will accede to your wishes," the jarl concluded without acknowledging the interruption.

"Thank you, Elisif," Diana said, leaning in to hug the younger woman.

"It's a shame that your husband couldn't join us today," Elisif said as they broke their hug. "Hopefully he'll be with you the next time?"

"Possibly," Diana hedged. "He's away on business a lot, so it's difficult to arrange our schedules for these sort of trips. Yet another reason I had hoped to stay away from politics."

"You're very lucky to have someone you're so anxious to spend time with," Elisif mused sadly. Diana gave her an understanding smile and patted her hand. I knew that Ulfric had murdered Elisif's husband, the former high king of Skyrim, but for her to still be so sad about losing him years later, she must have been deeply in love.

We said our goodbyes shortly after that and made our way back to Proudspire Manor. Jordis tagged along with us, smiling the whole way and occasionally making chipper commentary about how happy she was to be serving the Dragonborn, and how lucky she felt, and how nice we both seemed, and how she would do us proud… It went on at great enough length that I finally tuned it all out.

"Look," Hecate announced when we got back to the manor, "I'm only going to have one rule in this house." She gestured at the stairs, where movers were carrying furniture into the previously unoccupied rooms, then she stamped her foot. "No one is to use my bedroom while I'm gone. I don't care if I only use this place one day out of the year. That's my room, and it's only for me."

"What about Cicero?" I teased.

"Him too," she allowed, blushing.

"Who's Cicero?" Jordis asked.

"He's…" She paused, gritting her teeth hard enough that I could hear her jaw creak. "…my husband." I smiled a little; it always pleased me to see Hecate have to call Cicero her husband to other people, since she inevitably acted like being married to him was the worst thing she could imagine. It gave me hope for the future.

"Okay," Jordis smiled. "Will you be having an orgy before you leave, my thane?" I almost choked on my own tongue at the question.

"What?" Hecate managed to spit out.

"An orgy, my thane," she said formally, her eyes crossing slightly in deep thought. "I hear that Imperials have them all the time."

"Jordis," Hecate said carefully, "do you know what an orgy is?"

"I've never been to one," she responded slowly and thoughtfully, "but it would be an honor to be invited."

"No orgies," Hecate said. Her face had turned as red as a tomato, and I was having trouble breathing from holding in the laughter. "Do you mind if I talk to Aventus alone for a bit?"

"No, my thane," she said, sounding disappointed. The housecarl meandered away to supervise the movers, who were coming and going through a door on the far end of the house.

"I don't think she knows what an orgy is," I whispered once Jordis was out of earshot, struggling to stifle my giggles.

"Me neither," Hecate responded, "and I have no plans to correct her." She cleared her throat and continued on more evenly. "I'm staying at the manor overnight and leaving out in the morning. Do you have everything you'll need?" she asked.

"I'll be fine," I smiled.

"Well, just in case," Hecate continued, "let's go to the market and pick up any necessities that you might not have been able to pack. I know that you'll need a writing set and paper for classes…"

The three of us—Jordis insisted on coming along for our protection—spent the rest of the morning and part of the early afternoon in the market. Afterward, Hecate had sent Jordis home and escorted me to the Bards College.

I hoped that she would be able to visit during holidays, or that I would see her when she came to town, but I had hardened myself to the possibility that I wouldn't see Hecate for the next two years. Life was busy for an assassin—even more so when you were the voice of the Dark Brotherhood's god, responsible for the lives and deaths of dozens of people.

"I love you, Aventus," she said before she left. I knew that she meant it as a brotherly love.

"I love you too," I responded, knowing that she didn't realize I meant it a different way.

And then she was gone.

"You missed out on dinner," Ataf said as he walked in the door.

"Wasn't really hungry," I replied. I was laying on my bed, uncomfortable not because the bed was too hard or too soft, but just from its unfamiliarity. I had pulled my mandolin out of its padded case to practice, only to find out that I didn't really feel like it. Ataf wandered over to where the instrument lay on my desk and looked at it. I was gratified to notice that he didn't touch it without asking permission—I hated when people did that.

"I've never seen a lute like this," he commented.

"It's not a lute," I corrected. "It's a mandolin. They're Cyrodiilic. They have four double courses of strings, instead of the eight single courses lutes have."

"But they have the same number of strings?" he asked.

"Yeah," I replied, "but a different tonal range. Here, let me show you."

I sat up and took the mandolin while Ataf grabbed his lute for comparison. We stayed up together for a few more hours, exchanging stories about our musical experiences. I learned a bit about the classmates and teachers I would be meeting tomorrow, and Ataf was thrilled to learn that I actually owned books about musical theory.

If this was what being normal was like, then maybe I could get used to it after all.

…to be continued…


	2. No One of Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus settles into his new life at the Bards College, facing his own insecurities and meeting some new friends.

Chapter 2: No One of Note

 

In the last several years, I had killed over a dozen men and women with my own hands. I had fought giant frostbite spiders, been hunted by a troll through the catacombs below Sanctuary, broken the heart of a centuries-old vampire, and faced near-impossible odds in battle. At fourteen, I was a full-fledged member of the Dark Brotherhood. I thought that I was prepared for any pain or terror that life might bring me.

I found that standing in front of a room full of strangers and talking about myself was by far the most terrifying thing I had ever done.

"My name is Aventus Aretino," I began. "I'm originally from Windhelm."

I paused, looking around at the faces of my classmates and the other students, their eyes fixed on me. The full student body of the Bards College was present in the practice hall for orientation. The teachers were in the back of the room, save for Headmaster Viarmo, the Altmer who was in charge of the college. He was sitting next to the lectern I was standing behind, watching me intently with his intense golden eyes. The collective weight of the crowd's gaze made me sweat; a slow, cold rumble rolled through my stomach, and I clenched my throat to avoid vomiting.

"I don't really have much to say about myself," I continued lamely once my gut had stopped churning. "I'm not a very interesting person."

"I very much doubt that, Master Aretino," Viarmo said as he stood and nodded me back to my seat. My eyes widened; was he going to tell everyone what he knew about me? As I shakily walked away he continued, "One of the first lessons you will all need to learn as bards—as Aventus has demonstrated—is how to portray yourself as the most interesting person in the room. It's not enough to be a good musician or a good storyteller. A good bard must be a master of self-promotion."

"Does that mean a bard should lie to make himself sound more interesting?" I asked as I sat down.

"A bard never lies if he can help it," Viarmo scolded. "However, there is nothing in our code of ethics against presenting the facts with particular emphasis." The Altmer pulled an apple from his pocket and made it dance across the back of his hand as he spoke. "I could say that an apple is red and sweet, but 'red' and 'sweet' are common words. Everyone knows them. If I instead say that this apple is a stunning shade of crimson, with a piquant but honeyed flavor, though…" He took a bite from the apple for emphasis. "Emphasis and vocabulary are vital to our work."

"Sounds like a bunch of flowery nonsense to me," I said before I could catch myself. The students near me chuckled and snickered.

"Flowers are beautiful, Master Aretino," Viarmo said with a scowl. "Everyone loves flowers—even if they depend on roots and grains to live."

I flinched with the rebuke, and I could hear some of my classmates chuckle. Viarmo continued his lecture but I was only half-listening. I had a chair near the window, and my eyes kept drifting to the beautiful view outside. The ocean below Solitude was a different shade of blue than the dark ocean north of Dawnstar or the grey waters around Windhelm, crystalline and reflective in ways that I didn't know the sea could be. Ever since I had gotten my first good view of the ocean from the city, I had begun to understand why Hecate loved it so much.

I was up before dawn my first day at the Bards College. It had been my habit to get up early for the last several years, and I didn't sleep very much. Successful assassins learned to sleep little and sleep lightly. Unsuccessful assassins wound up with their throats cut. At least, that's what Nazir had always told me.

Thinking about the Redguard—our Speaker and our family's resident chef—made me melancholy for home, so I resolved to spend the morning doing something productive to take my mind off how much I missed everyone. I pulled on a pair of trousers and a loose shirt, then quietly slunk out of the room to avoid waking Ataf. The dormitory was arranged with rooms on either side of the hallway and a communal bath at the end of the hall.

Solitude was advanced enough that they had something I had never seen before: running water. The wash basins had small metal spigots over them that turned to produce a stream of cold water. I was clever enough to figure it out after a moment, but I was grateful that no one was around to see my fumbling attempts at looking for a water pump. There was also a curtained-off area on the other side of the chamber; checking behind it, I found an Imperial-style bath, big enough for a dozen people to wash at the same time if they were particularly friendly. Given the number of rooms I had counted on my floor, I figured that it wasn't meant that everyone who lived here would bathe at the same time.

I stripped down and lowered myself into the water, pleasantly surprised to find that it was quite warm. I didn't know how they kept it heated, and didn't particularly care. A warm bath was a luxury back at Dawnstar Sanctuary, and most of the inns I had stayed at since joining my profession charged extra if you wanted a bath at all. I didn't relish the idea of bathing with other people, but it didn't bother me all that much either. In the Dark Brotherhood, you got used to sharing personal space with others.

Though the bath was pleasant, I didn't stay long. I toweled off, dressed again, then headed outside. The bards didn't seem to be awake yet for the most part, so the building was nearly silent as I made my way to the rear doors. The pre-dawn city was quiet as well, and cold. Solitude had better weather than my native Windhelm, but autumn mornings in Skyrim were still frigid. I shivered, cursing myself for not having put on a coat, and looked around.

The rear exit of the Bards College opened onto a broad stone plaza with crenellated walls that looking out over the Carth River and to the Sea of Ghosts beyond. At the middle of the plaza was a tall post festooned with drooping and faded ribbons; the stones around it were blackened, as if by fire, and several other patches bore old scorch marks as well. I wondered if it was a legacy of the local festival Hecate had mentioned to me, though I couldn't remember the details right away. Something about burning?

Shaking away the attempt to remember, I put my fingers to my lips and whistled. It wasn't long before I got my response, a low and mournful howl from close by. I smiled at the sound. It had been painful to leave Pavot at Proudspire Manor rather than bringing him with me to the college, but Headmaster Viarmo had been insistent that since I had a place in the city to keep him other than my dormitory, I should keep him there. Jordis had promised to watch after the ice wolf, but I had little faith in the housecarl's ability to take care of herself, let alone a two hundred pound semi-domesticated predator. Hearing Pavot's howl warmed my heart. I would have to stop by and bring him a rabbit after class.

While my heart was warmed, my body was shivering with the cold. I started stretch to loosen my muscles—which were very stiff after not getting to exercise for the last several weeks, due to my injuries—then jogged around the circumference of the plaza to get my blood pumping. By the time I was ready to begin my workout, I was much warmer. The orange glow of sunrise began to smear across the horizon, bringing with it a warm breeze from the east. Even though it was still cool, I stripped off my shirt to avoid getting it sweaty while I trained; I planned on taking another trip to the baths once I was done here.

With my skin prickling from the cold, I dropped into my fighting stance, facing the pole at the middle of the plaza like a lethal enemy. I held my hands out in a warding posture, then started circling inward toward my mock-opponent. In a fight, you never wanted to run at your enemy head-on; controlling the pacing of a fight was vital, and that meant practicing footwork.

Once I had done a full spiral rotation in to the pole, I switched to an aggressive posture and threw a tentative punch at the wood. It seemed sturdy enough, so I started in full-force. I kept moving around the pillar as I punched, kicked, arm-blocked, and palm-struck, building strength and speed by running through the practice exercises that Nazir and Cicero had taught me. Punching wood was somewhat harder than punching flesh or training dummies, so my knuckles and palms ached after a few minutes. I kept at it, though; one of Nazir's complaints about my hand-to-hand abilities was my weakness in unarmed combat, so building that up while I was away at school was an important goal for me.

By the time I finished my combat exercises, the sun had crested the horizon. I took a few minutes' rest to just stand and watch it. The sun seemed somehow brighter in Solitude, the ocean bluer. Dolphins breached the surface of the sea as the sun rose, their sleek bodies catching the light and breaking it into thousands of radiant shards. It was beautiful.

I finally shook myself out of my reverie, which had lasted somewhat longer than I intended, so that I could finish my morning training. After combat practice came general calisthenics and acrobatics. While I didn't have a full gymnastics course here, I could use the environment for the same benefit. I jogged around the plaza again, this time at double speed and across the tops of benches and planters instead of on the ground. I flipped, tumbled, rolled, and wall-ran to build my general mobility. I did sit-ups, push-ups, and chin-ups, using the branch of a tree as my lifting bar.

By the time I got to the last exercise of my regimen, I was sweat-soaked and shaking with the exertion. My back was killing me and my gut roiled. After this, it would be time for a quick bath and some breakfast. Thinking about food made me think of Nazir again; breakfast just wouldn't be the same without his excellent cooking, or his commentary on my training program.

To banish the looming wave of homesickness I could feel bubbling up, I rolled over onto the palms of my hands and stood up on them. Hand-standing took a lot of concentration; you had to be perfectly balanced and perfectly centered. It was an exercise of the mind as well as the body. Once I was in a perfect handstand, I started flexing my elbows, slowly lowering myself until the top of my head touched the stones of the plaza. Then I pushed myself back up into the full handstand again.

Down. Up. Down. Up. Perfectly balanced. Perfectly centered.

"Holy shit," I heard someone say behind me, which made me lose my concentration enough that I went sprawling onto the hard stones with all the grace and dignity of a poleaxed cow. As I laid there on the stones, trying to catch my breath, the familiar face of Ataf loomed into my field of view. "Sweet Divines! Are you okay, Aventus?"

"Fine," I grunted out, feeling weak from the effort and dizzy from a rough fall. I sat up, and something in my back twinged. I might have overdone it a little. "I'll be fine," I said with more confidence. Ataf offered me his hand, and I took it without thinking, letting him help me up into a standing position.

"I didn't mean to startle you," he said sheepishly, running a hand across the back of his head, curling his fingers though his dark-brown hair in nervousness.

"No worries," I said, walking over to where I had hung my shirt up on a tree branch. "I should be the one who feels embarrassed." He looked at me quizzically, so I explained, "For letting you sneak up on me like that."

"Do you have people sneaking up on you often?" he asked.

"Not really," I lied. "I just normally notice that sort of thing."

"I didn't even hear you leave the room this morning," Ataf noted. "I'm a pretty light sleeper, so I usually notice that sort of thing." He raised an eyebrow to emphasize using my own words against me and I laughed at the show. I stopped laughing and winced when I lifted my arms to get my shirt back on. I had definitely overdone it.

"Kyne's grace," Ataf cursed as he walked up to me. "You say you fell off a horse?"

"Yeah," I lied again. Actually, I had nearly been gutted by an angry werewolf, sprained my back crushing his skull with a construction block, almost been beaten to death by Stormcloaks, and then rode a horse non-stop for two days to find medical attention, at the end of which my wounds had festered and I lapsed into a coma. But "fell off a horse" sounded a little less unlikely.

"What about this?" he asked, pointing at a scar along my stomach, not quite touching it. "Or this?" he said, pointing to another one. "Or any of these?" he concluded, gesturing broadly at my torso and flank. I was covered in fading bruises from my recent injuries, but I was also covered in a multitude of small—and not-so-small—scars.

At fourteen, I had more marks on my body than some twenty-year veterans of the legion. Some of them, I had received in training; my trainers had made a point of cutting me occasionally when my guard dropped, just to keep me from getting lazy. Others, I had taken in battle. While an assassin preferred to not have to go toe-to-toe with his targets whenever possible, sometimes it wasn't possible to avoid. Also, I had to admit that I wasn't as good of a planner as some of my siblings, occasionally leading to unfortunate encounters that probably could have been avoided with a little forethought.

I considered the scar Ataf had pointed at last. It had been given to me by a very angry man who had shown me that a broken bottle could be just as good as a knife in a pinch.

"I have a lot of accidents," I finally said. Ataf looked at me with an expression I had come to know very well, thanks to my friend Babette. It was what I thought of as the "do you think I'm a complete idiot?" look.

"Aventus," he said patiently, "I don't like to pry-"

"Then don't," I said abruptly, perhaps a little more rudely than I had meant to. The hurt look on Ataf's face made me instantly regret my tone. "I'm sorry," I quickly said, more softly. "I didn't mean anything by it."

"No, it's okay," he assured me. "I'm nosy. People are always telling me that I shouldn't push so much." He reached out a hand toward me. "Still friends?"

I thought about it a moment, then finally took his hand. I hadn't meant to make any friends here, but I found that I couldn't help liking Ataf. He was friendly, but he also seemed to have a genuinely gentle spirit. Our long conversation about music the previous night had shown me a passion for performance that I found appealing, and his obvious concern for me touched my heart. I smiled as I shook his hand.

"Still friends," I said. His smile caught the sunlight, and the day seemed warmer already.

Classes at Bards College didn't start until the tenth bell, and they let out at noon for lunch before resuming two hours later. All told, students only spent about five hours each day in classes. It was a very different sort of schedule for me.

By which I mean, I wasn't used to having a schedule at all.

Other than my first few weeks in the Dark Brotherhood, when my excellent teachers were working overtime to turn an underfed orphan into a killer, I had pretty much kept my own hours over the last several years. When you took a contract, you were expected to deal with it promptly, but you could use whatever methods and means you liked. There were rarely any deadlines to meet, and the entire idea of any meetings more regular than dinner with whoever happened to be in Sanctuary was a little ridiculous. Assassins were expected to be self-motivated.

The Bards College was very different. After finishing my morning exercises and taking a quick rinse in the bath, I had joined Ataf for breakfast in the school dining hall. The setup was a little surprising to me. Rather than have a standard time when food was served, the dining hall had full-time cooks who made hot meals for anyone who stopped in at any time of the day. Nazir had always been very clear with us: Show up when food is hot or eat it cold. There was also a small buffet of cold meats, bread, cheese, and fruit for anyone who didn't feel like they had the time to wait for that, as well as a crock of soup with a naphtha burner under it to keep it warm.

The whole thing just seemed very impersonal to me. I suppose that living in close quarters with a family—even an adopted one—had made me more social than I once was. A small posted sign listed what was available for the day near the counter. I barely recognized any of the food listed, so I just asked for the same thing Ataf got. I was so out of my element that I felt like I was wearing a big sign draped around my neck that declared how inappropriate it was for me to be here.

I let Ataf take the lead on deciding where to sit as well. At this time of the morning, only a few students were in the hall, and I didn't know any of them. To my surprise, Ataf led me to a table that already had people sitting at it.

"Good morning, everyone," Ataf said merrily as he sat down. I sat down next to him, and he gestured at me. "This is my roommate, Aventus Aretino."

"You have a roommate?" asked an older Nord boy with grey-white hair. I couldn't tell if it was natural or if he had dyed it that color, but it matched his ice-blue eyes and snow-pale complexion. "Since when?"

"Since yesterday," Ataf replied. "I was surprised too."

"It'll be good for you," said the Imperial girl sitting across from us. She had dark brown hair cut short, just below her ears in a forward-sweeping style. I wasn't familiar with the name of the style but it suited her; it made her severe face a little softer, adding curves to an appearance that was otherwise mostly sharp angles. She wasn't pretty in the usual sense, but she was definitely striking. "You would have gone stir-crazy living in a double room all by yourself."

"Anytime you weren't bothering us in our room anyway," teased the tawny-haired Nord girl sitting next to the Imperial. "At least now you'll have company."

"Aventus," Ataf said, pointedly ignoring the commentary from the other students, "allow me to introduce Jorn, Aia, and Illdi." Each of them nodded in turn as he said their names.

"Aia Arria," said the Imperial girl, reaching across the table to take my hand. I half-stood and clasped wrists with her briefly before sitting back down. "It's good to see another Imperial in the college. Are you local?"

"No," I replied. "I'm from Windhelm."

"Windhelm?" asked Jorn in surprise. "Have you ever seen Ulfric Stormcloak?"

"It's a big city," I told him. "I saw him once at a public speech with my mom, but he was a long way off. We could hear him all the way in the back, though—just like he was standing next to us."

"That's the power of the thu'um," Illdi interjected. I was quite familiar with the ability some men called Shouting, but rather than say that, I just nodded.

"Aventus assures me that there's nothing interesting about him at all," Ataf said, crossing his arms and raising an eyebrow at the others. I sighed, hoping that they wouldn't take his bait. "I mean, he's only an Imperial from the Stormcloak capital, whose mother has regular business in Solitude, and who happens to be the youngest bard in the college. Nothing special about any of that."

"I thought you were the youngest bard at the college?" Illdi asked.

"Not anymore," the young Redguard replied. "Aventus tells me that he's only fourteen."

"Seriously?" Aia asked, looking me up and down like a side of meat. "Are you sure you're an Imperial?"

"Yes!" I snapped, feeling my face heat up in a blush. "I wish people would quit asking me that!"

"Sorry about that," Jorn said with a disarming smile. "For people training in how to be diplomatic, we sometimes wind up tasting more shoe leather than we'd like."

"It's okay," I said, trying to calm down a little. "I just hear that a lot." I looked around at the faces of Ataf and his friends, trying to find a way to push myself out of the center of speculation. "So how did all of you meet?" I finally asked.

"Well," Aia started, "Ataf was kind enough to help me with my things while I was trying to move in. I had a few personal effects-"

"By which she means three cargo chests full of clothes," Ataf interrupted, pantomiming at rubbing his lower back. Everyone laughed, though Aia picked up a pea from her breakfast and threw it at him.

"Anyway," she continued, "Ataf helped me move in, which is when I met Illdi here." The Nord girl nodded and smiled. "The two of them were in my room, comparing class schedules. I had thought that I would get a private room, considering that my father is a person of some importance, but living with Illdi hasn't proven too terrible."

"Aia is a very talented person," Illdi said, looking at the older girl with stars in her eyes. "I'm lucky to have her living with me." The two girls exchanged a look of affection that passed so quickly that I thought perhaps I had imagined it. "I need all the help I can get."

"You say that your father is someone important?" I asked Aia.

"Achaius Arria," she said, as if I should know who that was. At my blank look she continued, "He's a senior liaison to the Imperial military forces in Solitude."

"He's an advisor to General Tullius," Jorn clarified. I nodded my thanks to him.

"He's here on a three-year rotation from Cyrodiil," Aia continued. "I'm at the Bards College to stay in practice until we go home."

"Aia's got a bright future ahead of her at the Imperial Academy for the Performing Arts," Ataf said enthusiastically. "Though I think that Illdi's better than she gives herself credit for." He looked over at the Nord girl with a goofy smile; I feared that my roommate was just setting himself up for disappointment, but it wasn't my place to get involved.

"What about you, Jorn?" I asked the snow-pale Nord boy, keeping the topic moving steadily away from me.

"I'm from around here," he replied, picking at his food. "My family lives in Solitude and knows Ataf's family. We'd met a couple of times before we both got sent here."

"So you're from around here too?" I asked Ataf.

"Not quite," he said. "My family is from Hammerfell, though they've been living in High Rock since before I was born. My father owns a mercantile company with an Imperial contract, so he brought me and my brother along with him to Solitude on buying trips a lot when I was younger." He nodded to the Nord boy. "Jorn's family owns the shipping company that we used to work with locally."

"Used to?" I asked, confused. "What happened?"

"The Blackblood Marauders happened," Jorn said with a grimace. "They sank half of our ships, stole our cargo, and killed decent men working for my father." He shook his head angrily. "Those pirate bastards cost us a fortune—and our contract with the Empire, once we didn't have enough ships to keep up with demand."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said sympathetically. "The shipping companies out in Windhelm were having problems with pirates the last time I was there too."

"Is it true that the Stormcloaks keep Argonians as slaves?" Illdi asked, leaning forward. "I heard that Ulfric Stormcloak hates the beast-kin so much that he has his soldiers shoot any Khajiit they see, but they round up Argonians to make them work on the docks as slaves."

"That's not so," I told her. "The Argonians don't get paid very much, but they're not slaves. And Khajiit aren't killed on sight; they're just not allowed into the city." I paused, thinking about it for a moment. "But that's just damning Ulfric with faint praise. The way he lets people treat the Dunmer refugees in Windhelm is criminal."

I was thinking about a particular incident where two men had harassed a dark elf woman to the point of tears in the middle of a crowded city plaza. No one had helped her. At least I had gotten the satisfaction of killing one of those men later. I sometimes wondered where Angrenor Once-Honored was these days; I had seen his cruelty, but he had also been quite kind to me.

"We hear all sorts of things in Markarth," Illdi said, breaking me out of my reverie. "Ulfric has a history there, so it's hard to tell what's true and what's just rumor."

"I hear the Dragonborn is siding with the Stormcloaks," Ataf said dourly, his usual good humor gone. "Pretty soon, we'll all have to bow to Eastmarch or get out of Skyrim."

"The Dragonborn would never side with Ulfric Stormcloak!" I nearly shouted, far more passionately than I had intended. The others looked at me curiously; I composed myself quickly and continued. "I mean, everyone knows that Ulfric's lieutenant is a fake now. The real Dragonborn has started making appearances at court here in Solitude again."

"I heard that from my father," Aia confirmed. She paused, tilting her head to look at me anew. "Though I'm curious how you know about it. Are your parents with the court?"

"Yeah," added Jorn, "we've told you our stories. What about you? Who are you, Aventus Aretino?"

"And don't give us that 'I'm not interesting' stuff either," insisted Ataf.

I sputtered and choked, taking a drink to cover my stalling. My efforts to move the conversation away from me had clearly failed. Now I had to come up with something to tell them that wouldn't see a repeat of this in the future.

"Guys," Illdi chastised while I was recovering, "don't pressure him. We just met Aventus; we don't want to run him off, do we?" She smiled at me graciously, and I gave her a relieved nod in return. "We're all going to be in class together, so we should try to get along. Aventus will tell us about himself when he's ready."

"Very well," Aia said dismissively, like a jarl holding court.

"We're going to be in class together?" I asked.

"Classes are arranged by ages," Jorn explained. "Some of the people who come to study at the Bards College are adults looking for a new path in life. Others are the sons and daughters of bards looking to follow in their parents' footsteps. We have people here as old as thirty and as young as… Well, as young as you, Aventus."

"The teachers break up people into age ranges," Illdi continued. "After that, they divide each group into classes of four to eight."

"There are twelve classes to handle around sixty students," Jorn picked back up. "The Bards College is big on class unity, so people from the same class are assigned to live near each other in the dormitories."

"We're all on the same floor," Ataf finished. "Jorn has a single room right next to ours, and Aia and Illdi share a room across the hall."

"I was supposed to have a roommate," Jorn added, "but apparently he withdrew at the last minute."

"Is it normal for boys and girls to be on the same floor?" I asked. I had gotten used to mixed-sex accommodations as a member of the Dark Brotherhood, but I had been under the impression that most people weren't comfortable with that sort of thing.

"At the Bards College it is," Ataf laughed. "I was a little shocked too, but we're working out bathing schedules and stuff like that. It's one of the reasons I was talking to Illdi the day Aia showed up."

"And he's got a crush on her," Jorn whispered to me, leaning close so that the others couldn't hear.

"I don't understand the fuss myself," Aia said loftily. "Back in Cyrodiil, mixed-gender bathing is the norm. I've been taking baths with my brothers and cousins since I was little."

"But have you ever bathed with strangers?" Jorn asked pointedly.

"Of course not," she scoffed. "My family has always had private baths."

"But it doesn't bother you?" Ataf asked. "The idea of being naked in front of strangers?"

"The bath is a private place," Aia insisted, "even when it's public. You simply aren't supposed to notice nudity. It's impolite." She frowned and looked at Jorn. "How do Nords bathe then?"

"A lot of them don't," he laughed. "Those of us who don't like smelling of horker fat and rancid meat usually wind up stripping to a loincloth and bathing in a river."

"That makes me feel cold just thinking about it," Ataf shuddered.

"Well, we're all going to have to get used to it," Illdi said, Nord practicality shining through like a beacon. "We've got the floor to ourselves, so it's just the five of us sharing a bath. We can work out schedules if you like, but that seems like a big waste of time to me."

"Wait," I asked, "there are only five of us on the whole floor?"

"There were going to be six originally," Jorn said, "but that's basically right. The number of students at the college is at an all-time low, thanks to the war. Since classes are arranged by age, and they put classes together in the dormitories, we're the youngest class in the school. Illdi, Aia, and I are all sixteen, and Ataf is fifteen."

"The next youngest student in the college right now is eighteen," Aia continued. "It just happened to fall that we're alone on the 'juniors' floor."

"Then why don't they just each give us a private room?" I asked.

"I guess they want us to have more social interaction?" Ataf asked, obviously not really sure himself. "All I know is that the housing matron tries to pair everyone up if possible." Ataf saw my look and continued before I could ask the question forming on my lips. "You haven't met her since you just got in yesterday. She's a little dotty, but nice. An old Nord lady, name of Braste. You'll probably see her after classes are over today, when she comes through to see if we need anything."

"Personally, I can't wait to meet Headmaster Viarmo," Aia gushed. "I hear he's one of the finest musicians and poets in all of Tamriel."

"You've been here for weeks, and you haven't met the headmaster yet?" I asked.

"He's a very busy mer," Aia insisted. "He's supposed to give us our orientation speech at the start of our class, then we'll meet the rest of our professors. I've already met a couple of them. So talented!"

"I wonder what Viarmo is like," Jorn mused. "I hear that he's way nicer than most Altmer."

"Altmer aren't that bad," Aia rebutted. "They're everywhere back in Cyrodiil, ever since the war ended. They can have a bit of an attitude, but I imagine that it's hard to not feel a little superior when you're nearly immortal and can use magic intuitively that it takes men a lifetime to master."

"I guess," I allowed reluctantly.

"Excuse me," said a young woman as she walked up to the table. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but Headmaster Viarmo would like to meet with you before classes begin."

"I'm honored," Aia said as she started to stand.

"Not you, Mistress," the woman said. "I'm to fetch Master Aretino."

The others looked at me, eyes wide and curious. Aia sat down, her face turning red and her lips twisting into a pout. I felt my own cheeks begin to burn.

"There must be some mistake," I stammered, searching for something to say. "Have I done something wrong?" I finally sputtered out. Better for them to think I was in some sort of trouble than that I was getting special treatment.

"I couldn't say, Master Aretino," she replied. "He only said that he wanted to speak to you."

"Sorry, guys," I said as I stood up. "I'll see you in class."

"Sure, Aventus," Ataf said amiably.

"And he says he's no one special," I could hear Aia muttering as I walked away. "My father is a diplomatic consul, and…" By then, I was outside the dining hall and couldn't hear anything more.

All I could think was that the headmaster had better have a good reason for this. I wasn't supposed to be getting any special treatment, and he was already dragging me away from breakfast for a private interview. I sincerely hoped that this wasn't going to set a trend for the next two years.

"Ah!" exclaimed Viarmo as I entered his spacious office. "A pleasure to meet with you at last, my dear boy. Please, come in!"

I walked into the headmaster's office, gazing around in wonder at the plethora of musical instruments, books, scrolls, maps and other trinkets that decorated the shelves and walls of the room. His desk was a huge oak fixture, covered in sheet music, spare parchment, and ink jars. An old mug sat on one corner of the desk, filled with various kinds of quills; a ramekin full of nibs sat next to it.

Viarmo shook my head briefly and then gesture for me to sit down in a plush, overstuffed chair in front of his desk. He didn't move to the stiff-looking seat on the other side, instead simply brushing a corner of the desk clear and leaning against it. Viarmo was a golden-skinned Altmer, easily seven feet tall, though like all of his kind he seemed stretched somehow, thin and lanky. He wore rich blue robes that accented his coppery hair and neatly-trimmed goatee.

"Are you settling in all right?" he asked. I nodded, which brought a smile to his face. "Good, good. I was hoping to get a chance to meet with you yesterday, but my meeting with your mother took somewhat longer than either of us had thought it would. As well, I have responsibilities with Elisif's court."

"You're a very busy mer," I said. "I don't want any special treatment."

"Your mother said something very similar the first time I met her," he laughed. "You're a chip off the old block, as humans sometimes say."

"She's not my real mother," I pointed out.

"Nonetheless," he insisted, "I can see her influence on you. Our families aren't the people we're born to—or not just them, at any rate. It's all of the people who love us and want the best for us. We're influenced by those people, and we influence them in turn." He thought for a moment, stroking his goatee. "To some degree, being a bard is learning how to influence people and make friends without that sort of bond."

"Was there something you wanted to see me about, sir?" I asked, fearing that Viarmo might go on at length if I didn't bring him back to the point.

"Excuse me," he apologized. "I tend to ramble. It's a side effect of a lifetime of public performance." He rifled through the papers on his desk for a moment before pulling out a folder, looking in it, and tossing it back on the desk. "Mostly, I wanted to see what sort of person the Dragonborn's son was before we get too deep into the teacher-student relationship. Your mother is a friend of mine, but she's also one of the most historically important people I've ever had the privilege of meeting."

"Have you met Ulfric Stormcloak?" I asked, curious because of Jorn's question to me earlier.

"Once," he admitted. "He's a powerful personality, but nowhere near as important as Diana."

"Isn't he single-handedly responsible for the civil war?"

"That's debatable," Viarmo said with a slight smile. "I can already tell that Giraud is going to love you or hate you." He spoke up before I could say anything, "Giraud Gemane is our Dean of Histories. He'll be teaching your class on the Empire's musical history this semester." I nodded, and he continued. "Even if you accept that Ulfric is the sole cause of the war… Well, wars come and go, Aventus. A century from now, Ulfric Stormcloak will be a footnote in the annals of history—if he's lucky. But Diana Dragonborn? The savior of Nirn? People will be singing her praises for the rest of the Era."

"How do I stack up then?" I asked, somewhat sullenly. I didn't like being compared to other people; being compared to the Dragonborn was hardly even fair.

"Master Aretino," he said formally, standing up again, "I can already tell that you're going to be someone great. I don't know if your destiny is as a bard or not—and quite frankly, I was more surprised to hear that Diana wanted you enrolled here than that she had a son no one knew about—but I feel that you're going to be a person of some note." He paused, then chuckled. "If you'll forgive the pun."

"I'm no one special," I insisted, not really understanding the pun he was talking about. It had gotten to be such a rote thing to say that it slipped out of my mouth without even really thinking about it.

"Your mother said something very similar to me the first time we met," he repeated before standing up and leading me to the door. "She was wrong too."

My mind finally drifted back to the orientation. I had half-heard Viarmo introducing the school's various teachers, but there were only three of them that mattered to me.

Giraud Gemane, the Breton who Viarmo had mentioned, would be teaching my class over Imperial musical history. Inge Six-Fingers was an older Nord woman; I couldn't tell if she lived up to her surname from this distance, but she would be teaching our class on the fundamentals of stringed instruments, as well as co-teaching another class with Giraud, this one over the history of music in Skyrim. Our final class would be over the fundamentals of wind instruments and vocal music, taught by a middle-aged Imperial woman named Pantea Ateia.

All told, my four classmates and I would be spending every Morndas through Fredas in class, generally from about tenth bell to noon, then from second bell to dinner. Viarmo explained that we were expected to practice on our own outside of classes as well, and many of the teachers would be leading morning and evening practice sessions for those of us who felt the need for extra attention. We would have Loredas and Sundas to ourselves; while we were not forbidden from leaving the college grounds, it was strongly discouraged from doing so except on the weekends.

I was introduced to the concept of homework. It seemed like a trick of some kind. We were supposed to attend classes, but then we had things to do outside of class that were necessary to get a good grade? Why not just have that be part of class time?

And then the entire concept of grades seemed odd. As an assassin, it was pretty obvious when you succeeded or failed at a task, considering that failed assassins were usually dead assassins. Having our teachers judge whether our work met with their approval or not almost seemed like a conflict of interest. If they were teaching us, didn't it reflect badly on them if we didn't learn well enough to get a good grade? So wouldn't they be inclined to give us better grades to make themselves look better?

The whole thing was just strange to me, but I guessed that normal people dealt with this sort of thing all the time. Life as a contract killer was so much simpler.

"And with that," Viarmo concluded holding his hands wide as if to embrace the whole student body, "I welcome you to the Bards College of Solitude."

The students around me began to applaud so I joined in, even though I had missed most of Viarmo's speech. I wasn't sure, but I could swear that the Altmer headmaster actually winked at me as he walked by, as though sharing some private joke. I was a little startled when Ataf's hand fell on my shoulder, but I managed to avoid either flinching or breaking his fingers, both of which were natural reactions for me at being touched unexpectedly.

"Come on," he said, "you don't want to be late for our first class."

"Sure thing," I agreed, picking up the leather satchel that held my books and parchment from under my seat.

"So what did Viarmo want from you earlier?" he asked as we walked together.

"Nothing particularly," I said. "There was some sort of mix-up with my paperwork."

"And the headmaster just happened to want to deal with it personally?" Ataf said doubtfully. "Aventus, you're going to have to get better at this whole lying thing if you're going to keep it up for two years."

"Sorry," I said sheepishly, not even sure what I was apologizing for. "Look, I just don't want any special treatment. From anyone."

"Unlike Aia," my friend laughed, "who seems to want it from everyone." He clapped me on the shoulder and kept walking. "You seem like a decent sort, so I'll let it slide. But eventually, you're going to wind up telling me the truth."

Divines, I hoped not.

It occurred to me that I had spent much of my life mastering the art of being invisible—to the point that I was no longer comfortable doing even the basic things that normal people took for granted. I had been taught to not pry into others' lives, but normal people talked about themselves and each other almost constantly. I had lived in the shadows so long that I had become like the Falmer, a blind thing afraid of the light.

Perhaps that was what Hecate had wanted me to learn by coming to Solitude: how to survive in the light as well as the dark. If so, I intended to live up to her expectations for me. My natural inclination might be to shy away from the public eye, and I had secrets that had to be kept at all costs, but I could still find ways to excel and to win people over. As I walked into the first classroom I had ever been inside, I steeled myself for whatever came next.

It was time.

…to be continued…


	3. School Grounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus is chafing under the restrictions of life at the Bards College, until some old friends come along to cheer him up.

Chapter 3: School Grounds

 

I adapted to the rhythm—so to speak—of life at the Bards College pretty quickly. Get up, exercise, bathe, grab breakfast with my classmates, go to class, take lunch, go to more classes, have dinner, evening practice, free time, and sleep. It was the most stable that my life had ever been. I had a regular schedule, saw the same faces every day, and never left the ground of the college.

Honestly, it was driving me a little crazy.

After nearly three years of life as a member of the Dark Brotherhood, a regimented schedule was as foreign to me as the life of an assassin would be to any of my classmates. I was used to staying up as late as I liked, staggering out of bed when I pleased, eating dinner with my family if they were in, and going wherever I wanted to go—and, of course, killing people for money.

At the Bards College, everything was taken care of for me. There were servants who made my bed while I was out of my room. Food was ready at all hours of the day if I cared to eat. The bath was always warm whenever I wanted one. There were lots of free rooms for individual practice and performance. But those were all creature comforts, illusions designed to hide my essential status as a prisoner.

After the stress of my first couple of weeks of classes and dodging Ataf's occasional attempts at uncovering my life story, I had desperately wanted to go into Solitude for a drink. I wasn't all that fond of the taste of mead, but I had discovered that you didn't care so much about the flavor after drinking a few mugs of it. Once dinner was finished and the last dregs of twilight had begun to bleed away into darkness, I had pulled on my heavy woolen cloak and made a beeline for the main gates.

Torches and lanterns filled the courtyards of the Bards College with soft light after sunset, so it was easy to navigate. Not that I couldn't have done it in the dark, but it's always preferable to have light when you can. In the flickering glow of the lights, something looked different about the main gate. It wasn't until I got close to it that I realized what it was. The gates were closed. A quick pull at the bars revealed that they were also locked tight. I had known that we weren't expected to go out into Solitude on weeknights, but during his orientation speech, Viarmo had phrased it as a "strong suggestion."

Looking at the lock with a wary eye, I could now see that "strong suggestion" was a euphemism for "locking us in."

Naturally, I could have picked the lock or scaled the wall. Given a choice between the two, I would have preferred to scale the wall; while I could pick simple locks pretty quickly, I just didn't have the fine manual dexterity to handle anything more complicated. I could also have just broken the lock off with a few well-placed swings of my collapsible mace, but I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed that.

Just as I was getting ready to scale the walls, I caught sight of a moving torch in the corner of my vision. I quickly ducked into the shadows and froze. As the torch-bearer came into view, I could see that it was Inge Six-Fingers, one of my instructors. She seemed vaguely bored as she patrolled the grounds, looking back and forth with less than total interest. She passed right by my hiding spot without seeing me at all, then continued on.

After she was gone, I could have scaled the wall and gone into town without being seen, but my time in the Brotherhood had made me too cautious for that. Knowing that they had grounds patrols made me wary. What else might they do to keep track of students? I knew that the staff could get into our rooms; the mysterious cleaning that happening while I was in class attested to that. Would they check on us at night? I thought that I slept lightly enough that I would notice that sort of thing, but there was always the chance that they had some other way of spying on us.

All of my assassin's training told me that I had to do real surveillance if I wanted to escape notice. Right now, the enemy had all of the advantages—home turf, numbers, civilian hostages…

That was when I realized that I was thinking about my teachers as "the enemy," and maybe I should just go back to my room and get some rest.

"This is just disgraceful," Ataf complained over breakfast the next morning. "How can they expect us to develop people skills if they just lock us in at night?"

At first, I was surprised to hear my roommate admitting that he had tried to sneak out in the night, but then I realized that he hadn't considered it "sneaking out" at all. He had just considered it normal to be able to go out on a weeknight, even when the teachers apparently didn't want us to. I still didn't want to admit my own interest in going out, so I just made a noncommittal questioning noise.

"You know you're not supposed to be spending nights on the town, right?" chided Jorn. "You should be focusing on your studies, not carousing."

"I wasn't going to 'carouse,'" Ataf groused. "One of my cousins is in town, and I just wanted to say hello." Ataf smiled crookedly. "Of course, if he had wanted to ply me with fine Imperial wine until the wee hours of the night, I certainly wouldn't have refused."

"Would this be your cousin who's in the wine shipping business?" Illdi teased.

"I can't believe that you would sneak off to get drunk during the first week of school," Aia sniffed imperiously. I took another mouthful of eggs to cover my own chagrin as she continued. "It's just disgraceful." I slunk down in my seat, doing my level best to disappear into the floor.

"I take it that locking the gates after dark isn't normal?" I asked, trying to cover my own embarrassment.

"Well, I don't know how it is in Windhelm," Aia commented loftily, "but Solitude is the safest city in the province. The presence of the Imperial army makes most people think twice about causing trouble, and that's before you take into account the Haafingar guards. They're the best-trained, best-equipped hold guards in Skyrim. That's on top of the city walls, which keep out anyone who isn't supposed to be here."

"I heard there was a serial killer loose in Windhelm," Jorn said with something like real nervousness.

"That's over now," I said before I could catch myself. The others looked at me curiously, hoping for the first real piece of gossip from my lips since we had met. I sighed at my own stupidity and continued. "I mean, I haven't been home in a few years, but I try to keep up with the news. They say that the Butcher finally bit off more than he could chew and one of his victims turned the tables on him. Turned out he was some shopkeeper who was into necromancy."

The others oohed and aahed over the juicy gossip while Ataf eyed me warily with a slight smile. When we left the dining hall, he fell behind with me while the others walked ahead to class.

"You haven't been home in years, but you're up to date on gossip that's only a month old," he mused.

"Don't start again, Ataf," I warned. "I haven't been home in three years because of the civil war. It doesn't mean that I'm deaf."

"But it does mean that you have some way of getting regular, reliable information from the rebel capital," he continued. "The Butcher's body was found near the end of Last Seed. I only know about it because my family still does business with the Shatter-Shields—and I only found out a couple of days ago. You sound like you've known for weeks."

I wheeled around and fixed him with an angry glare. I didn't like people prying into my life, maybe as a legacy of Nazir's repeatedly saying that siblings didn't pry into each other's lives from before the Brotherhood. Since I had joined the Dark Brotherhood at eleven, I didn't have much life before it—but at the same time, I couldn't talk about my life in the Brotherhood with civilians, which Ataf definitely qualified as.

"Sorry, Aventus," Ataf said sheepishly, taking my warning glare for what it was. I sighed as he turned away, a hurt look on his face. Ataf was one of those people that it was tough to stay angry at, and who you felt bad if you had to be angry at them for any length of time.

"I just…" I started. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Because of your scars?" he asked. "Like the old, twisted ones on your back."

I felt my blood chill. I had never talked to anyone about what had happened to me at Honorhall Orphanage—not even to my siblings in the Dark Brotherhood. It had been half a year in the deepest pits of hell. The scars on my stomach and arms were thin, pale things, remnants of training with knife-work or battles of various sorts. The ones on my back were from Honorhall, though. They were pale and distorted from my growth spurt, but they were the ones that had seen the least medical attention so they were the most obvious.

The mistress of the orphanage, Grelod the Kind, had been anything but her nickname. She had beaten the children under her care, chained us up in small rooms for days on end without food or water, half-starved us even on good days, and deprived us of even the most basic forms of human kindness. One of her favorite pastimes had been to whip us with thorn-covered branches while we did our chores. She said it was fine motivation to do the chores swiftly.

Even thinking about that old crone made me glad she was dead. My only regret was that I hadn't been the one to kill her. Something of my ferocity must have leaked through because Ataf laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed briefly.

"All I'm saying," he said kindly, "is that if you need someone to talk to, I can be a good listener too."

I nodded, not really understanding what he was getting at, but somehow grateful anyway.

The rest of the morning dragged, and I occasionally caught Ataf or Illdi sneaking glances at me during Professor Gemane's lecture on the origins of the modern musical notation system. Gemane was a compelling speaker and the material was fascinating, but I just couldn't seem to focus. Ataf's unusual offer kept coming back to me, and for the first time in a year or more, I kept thinking about Honorhall.

I had wondered occasionally over the years what had become of my friends from the orphanage. Runa, Samuel, Hroar… They had taken me into their confidence when I was nearly beaten to death by Grelod the Kind. They had been stealing food from her private pantry as well as stealing from the marketplace to supplement their diet, and they had shared their secret with me. I had resolved to escape Honorhall to save them as much as I had to save myself. When the Brotherhood adopted me, I had tried to convince Hecate to bring the other children in as well, but she had refused. Ever since, I had hoped that they had found their way to good families, but I had no way of knowing for sure.

Thinking about my orphan friends brought with it a sting of melancholy, but I was sure that they were fine now that Grelod was dead. Thinking about Honorhall itself, though… All day, ever since Ataf had brought it up, I had been brooding over the suffering I had seen and experienced in Riften. My months on the road after fleeing the orphanage had taught me about self-sufficiency; my time in the Brotherhood had taught me the power of family; but my time at Honorhall had taught me about the darkest pits of human suffering.

To say that it haunted me occasionally would be an understatement.

When we were finally dismissed for lunch, I rushed to get cold cuts and eat quickly so that I wouldn't be tempted to start talking to Ataf. There was something compelling about the young Redguard's offer that I couldn't seem to shake. The idea of being open with another human being—talking about my past, about my feelings—was somehow enthralling. It was so outside my frame of reference that it was like hearing about Cyrodiil or High Rock, or all those other exotic places that people visited but I had never seen. Except that this was a place that most people lived in, and I was the outsider.

I had barely finished my food when one of the school's docents—which I gathered was something like a teacher's assistant—came up to me to inform me that I had a guest waiting for me at the school entrance.

"Who is it?" I asked. I didn't really know anyone in Solitude, and it was far too soon for Hecate to be checking up on me again.

"I don't know, sir," the docent said. She pulled out a folded, sealed envelope and handed it to me. "She only said to give you this."

I turned away from the docent and opened the letter. All of my worries and fears fell away as I saw what was written within. Other people might have been afraid at the sign of the Black Hand, but for me it was a sign of family. Written beneath the black handprint were two simple words: "We're here."

I stuffed the letter in my pocket and raced toward the school entrance as fast as my feet could carry me.

By the time I got to the front gates, I could hear laughter coming from up ahead. I was surprised to see Pantea Ateia, my voice teacher, sitting on a stone bench with a handsome middle-aged Breton. The two of them were chatting amiably, with my professor tittering like a schoolgirl whenever her gentleman suitor said something particularly witty.

I scanned around, looking for whoever might have dropped the letter off, and nearly choked on my own spit when I realized that Pantea's "gentleman suitor" was actually Elbent, one of my brothers-in-arms. I hadn't recognized him right away because I wasn't used to seeing him clean-shaven and dressed in anything other than ratty peasant clothes. The Elbent sitting across from my teacher—and were they holding hands?—was dressed like a Breton noble, with his hair pulled back in a neat queue and his sideburns neatly groomed.

"Ah, there he is!" Elbent exclaimed in a smooth, cultured voice totally unlike his regular one, save for the slight grit at the back of his throat. "I'm afraid we'll have to continue this at a later time, my dear."

"Of course," Pantea said as she stood, her cheeks rosy and flushed. She touched my shoulder briefly as she walked back toward the school. "Your uncle is a charmer, dear," she giggled as she left.

"My uncle?" I asked as I walked toward Elbent.

"They don't let strangers check up on students," he growled in a voice much more like his normal one. "Someone had to come up here to get you, and I don't think they would have bought it if Garnag had come himself."

"Garnag's here too?" I asked excitedly. "Is there a mission on? Do you guys need my help?" I couldn't keep the hope out of my voice. Two weeks in the Bards College had made me stir-crazy in a way that I had never felt being cooped up in Sanctuary.

"Didn't you get Hecate's letter?" Elbent asked. I shook my head; as far as I knew, Hecate hadn't written me since I had come to school. I didn't mind, though. I knew she was busy. He sighed and continued, "Kid, there's no easy way to say this…"

"Don't call me kid," I said automatically.

"Sorry," Elbent said graciously enough. I was paying attention now; Elbent never apologized. "Look… We're getting sent to High Rock to reopen the Sanctuary at Wayrest."

"What?" I exclaimed dumbly. "You and Garnag?"

"Not just the two of us," he explained. "Anaril, Deesei, Geldii and Eiruki are going too. Six of us should be enough to get the Sanctuary off the ground. Seemed to work well enough for Dawnstar, after all."

"All the new recruits except for Vedave…" I mused.

"And didn't Anaril throw a fit about that," Elbent laughed. "I've heard Altmer be demanding, but I've never seen one on the verge of tears before."

"Eiruki is with you?" I blurted out before I could catch myself.

"Figured you'd ask about her," Elbent said with a smirk. I could feel my cheeks burning as Elbent chuckled. "But yes, we're all in Solitude for a few days, picking up supplies and resting from the road before making out final push into High Rock."

"How are you going to get across the border?" I asked.

"I know some back ways through the mountains around Jehenna," Elbent explained. "The city got annexed by Haafingar a few years back during one of the Imperial redistricting moves, but the civil war broke out not long after. Now, no one knows who should be patrolling what, so the whole area is wide open. There would probably be smugglers using the passes, but Solitude doesn't really need to smuggle supplies in."

"And High Rock is already a preferred trading partner, so it wouldn't be profitable the other way," I finished. Elbent looked at me with surprise. "Hey, I actually bother listening when Garnag talks about this sort of thing." Elbent's approving nod made me feel flushed with pride.

"Hecate was supposed to write you and let you know we would be coming through," Elbent finally continued.

"The letter was probably just delayed," I said, waving it off.

Honestly, I figured it was about even odds whether Hecate ever sent me a letter or not. I loved our Listener, but she could be pretty thoughtless at times—and she was genuinely quite busy. I was already starting to feel a churning sensation in my stomach, worrying that there was more to this sudden decision to reopen Wayrest Sanctuary than Elbent was saying. Still, I was so excited about the possibility of seeing my family again that I was willing to overlook nearly anything.

"Want to grab dinner with us tonight?" Elbent asked. "Garnag said you're probably feeling a little overwhelmed by all of this, and some friendly faces might help."

"I'd love to!" I exclaimed, then felt my face fall. "But it's a weeknight." Elbent looked confused, so I explained. "They've been locking the gates at night. I don't dare scale the walls. Someone might see, and Hecate was really firm about me not making anyone suspicious."

"Hmmm," Elbent mused. "Your pretty teacher there—what was her name?"

"You think Professor Ateia is pretty?" I said with disbelief. The older Nord woman wasn't bad-looking, I supposed, but I didn't think of her as "pretty."

"That's it," he continued, smiling to himself. "Pantea Ateia. Kind of rolls off the tongue…" He noticed me staring at him, then coughed and continued. "She said that the reason the gates were locked when I got here is that the college has had some break-ins lately. She assured me that it was in a part of the school that no students live in and that there was no danger."

"Robberies?" I asked, feeling a little silly for thinking that they had just been trying to lock us in. "Why don't they just get the city guard to patrol more instead of locking the place up like a vault?" Before Elbent could respond, I smacked myself in the forehead and answered my own question. "Because it would be bad for their reputation, of course."

"Of course," Elbent nodded. "It shouldn't matter, though. Pantea says that any student who wants to go out can just ask to be let out. You're not prisoners, after all."

I nodded, turning away from Elbent so that he couldn't see how red my face was turning. In all of my planning to get out of the Bards College, the one thing I had never even considered was just asking a teacher to let me out.

Professor Ateia was gracious about giving me an evening pass to leave campus to have dinner with my "uncle," seeing as he would only be in Solitude for the night. I explained to Ataf that I probably wouldn't be back until the morning, then quickly ducked out before he could ask me any questions. One of the docents followed me to the front gates with a key, letting me out and locking the gates behind me once I was gone.

And then I was free.

I would have to go back, of course, but I hadn't realized how caged I felt until I was outside the walls of the Bards College. While I had been stuck in Sanctuary for days or weeks on end with no work before, Hecate had always made it clear to me that the Black Door wasn't locked from our side. Short of shirking my few responsibilities, I was free to do as I pleased. A life of structure and rules wasn't something that sat well with me.

It wasn't hard to make my way through the streets of Solitude to the Winking Skeever, the inn that Brotherhood members stayed in whenever they came through this part of Skyrim. It wasn't the biggest or nicest inn in the city, but it asked the least questions and had a rowdy atmosphere that suited most assassins pretty well. It was a good place to get a room for a night or two, have some drinks, eat greasy tavern food, and blow a few septims from a job well done.

As I walked in the front doors in the dying autumn evening, Corpulus Vinius was behind the bar. His son Sorex was running drinks to the tables along with a trio of Nord serving women wearing clothes that were probably too low-cut to be comfortable outdoors at this time of year. One of them winked at me as I entered, so she was the one that I approached.

"Excuse me," I said as I sidled up to her, "but I'm looking for some friends of mine." I palmed a septim onto her serving tray as a sleight-of-hand trick, and she giggled. "A group of six or so. One of them is a big orc with one eye." When I mentioned who I was looking for, she stopped laughing and went pale.

"You've got some dangerous-looking friends," she said nervously. "They're in the back room. Got it rented out for the whole night." I nodded my thanks and headed that way.

The back room of the Winking Skeever was a dim affair normally, but it was lit up like the aurora when I stepped in. Dancing globes of magical light hung in the air, drifting to and fro as their makers reeled and drank. Garnag was sitting at the head of a long table covered in food, plates, and mugs of beer and mead. A pair of musicians were in the far corner of the room, playing a flute and drumming as Deesei and Elbent danced a merry jig. Anaril and Geldii were engaged in some sort of deep conversation while Eiruki sat at the far end of the table, watching the dancing over a mug.

The smile dropped off my face and I staggered a step as I set eyes on Eiruki. Her beautiful face was swollen and bruised, one of her eyes half-shut from what must have been a painful beating. When she lifted her mug to drink from it, I could see ugly black and red marks on her throat; some were fading to yellow already, but it was clear to me that someone had tried to strangle her—and recently.

I could feel my breathing go rough and my hands clenched. Those weren't the marks of a contract gone wrong. Targets didn't normally beat you savagely or choke you when they managed to turn the tables; stab wounds, slashes, and concussions were more likely, when such table-turning wasn't fatal. I knew who had done this. Those same hands had "taught me a lesson" only a few months before. It had been weeks before the bruises faded, even with the help of our resident alchemist and healer.

Right then, if Cicero had been standing in front of me, I would have gladly caved his head in.

"Aventus!" Garnag shouted, knocking me out of my reverie. Even with only one eye, the old orc was more perceptive than most people with two. The assembled assassins turned and shouted cheerfully as I walked up to my old partner and embraced him.

"It's good to see you, Garnag," I managed to force out around the lump in my throat. "I wish I could have had a little forewarning, though."

"It was sudden for us too, lad," he responded. "The Listener decided that the time had come to reopen a second Sanctuary, and well… You know how Hecate can be when she sets her mind on something." His tone made me hold my tongue until the others had finished their greetings.

As usual, Eiruki was the last to approach me. We stood at arm's length for a moment, looking at each other nervously, until finally she stepped forward and we embraced one another. I smiled at her when we finally stepped apart, not quite able to make it reach my eyes.

"I know I'm not as pretty as the last time you saw me," she whispered through bruised lips.

"You'll always be beautiful," I responded. She giggled and hugged me again. I couldn't deny that I had missed Eiruki in the last few weeks, though in a different way than the rest of my family. Once everyone had moved off to give the three of us some room, I looked at Garnag. "Cicero did this," I said. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah," Garnag nodded. "It was Chickpea."

"And Hecate just let him get away with it, right?" I demanded angrily. "She sent all of you away rather than punish that gods damned fool."

"Stop right there," Garnag snarled. I paused, shocked. He had never spoken like that to me before. I sat down in the chair next to him and took the mug that he handed me. "I know you're mad," he said more softly, "but you need to step away from your anger." Eiruki sat down next to me and laid a gentle hand on my arm.

"Why are you defending him?" I asked Garnag. I turned to Eiruki. "And why aren't you mad?"

"I'm not defending his actions," Garnag insisted. "But Chickpea-" He paused and corrected himself. "Cicero is the Keeper. After the Night Mother and Hecate, he's the highest-ranking member of the Dark Brotherhood. He can interpret the Tenets in the absence of the Listener—and he decided that Eiruki had broken them."

"He's crazy, Garnag," I pleaded. "He's not responsible to make those kinds of decisions."

"He's the Keeper," Garnag responded simply. "He's not the same man I used to know in a lot of ways, but his devotion to the Brotherhood has never changed. And you need to remember that before you go flying off the handle about it. Eiruki wasn't seriously hurt, Hecate put some limits on Cicero's ability to punish infractions, and-"

"And she sent you away," I interrupted. I cast my eyes down and took a long pull off my mug. "Just like she sent me away."

"We're doing important work," he insisted. "The Black Hand needs to reach back across all of Tamriel if we're going to regain the respect we once had. Hell, she named me Speaker! I never once thought I'd see the day." He paused to take a long drink before continuing. "I may not like the way it all came to pass, but I'd be a poor assassin indeed if I wasn't able to see a good deal when it slapped me in the face. All of us will benefit from this in the long term, Aventus—even you."

"Maybe," I conceded. "But-"

"Can we not argue?" Eiruki asked. "We don't know when we're all going to be together again. Let's just enjoy the night." Her soft brown eyes held promises that I didn't know if I wanted to accept. I hesitated, and Garnag laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.

"Sounds like the two of you have some catching up of your own to do," he chuckled. "Go on. We have rooms upstairs. The two of you go and… talk… for a while. I'll be here all night." Before I could protest, Eiruki took my arm with a wicked smile and dragged me away from the old orc.

"Seems like we only get to be alone together when one of us is hurt," she breathed into my ear. "You get to be gentle with me this time."

Suddenly, I didn't care so much about anything else.

When I rejoined Garnag in the back room of the Winking Skeever, it was somewhere between midnight and morning. Only Elbent and Garnag were still awake, sitting together and drinking quietly as they talked. None of the others were anywhere to be seen; Eiruki was still in her room, sleeping comfortably, and I assumed the others had gone back to their own rooms to pass out.

"Finished… catching up?" Garnag asked, bringing a chuckle to Elbent's lips as well.

"Hand me that cup," I growled, ignoring his comment.

"I meant what I said earlier," he continued as he handed me a drink. "It's good to see you."

"You too, old friend," I smiled. Elbent coughed into his mug and I shot him a look.

"What am I?" he slurred drunkenly. "Chopped horker liver?"

"I already said it was good to see you, Elbent," I groused.

"When?" he asked, looking genuinely confused. Before I could open my mouth, he continued, "Oh yeah, when I was talking to your teacher about that fiddle that got stolen."

"Fiddle?" I asked. It was my turn to be confused.

"Some old lute got stolen from the college," he slurred. "S'why the place is locked up so tight."

"Wait," I asked, thinking about something Professor Gemaine had lectured about recently. "You don't mean Finn's lute, do you?"

"That was it!" Elben said, standing up with a broad smile. The smile didn't leave his face even as he slumped back down into his chair and passed out.

I frowned in thought. If Finn's lute had been stolen from the college, it was no wonder the teachers were so concerned about security. Finn was the first bard to use an eight-course lute, and his original instrument was virtually priceless. In fact, it was so valuable that it literally couldn't be sold without so many questions being raised that it was hardly worth it. Honestly, it had probably been picked up by random burglars who hadn't realized what it was they had taken.

"You've got that look on your face," Garnag said with a smile.

"What look?" I countered.

"The one that says you're so bored that you're thinking about playing hero just for something to do," he responded.

"It's not that I'm bored," I said instantly. "Well, not just that. I figure if I can get Finn's lute back, maybe the teachers will lay off on keeping the college locked up tighter than old Grelod's moneybox. Have time for one more job together?"

"Afraid not," Garnag said sadly. "I have to get this motley crew running up through the passes to High Rock as soon as possible, though I still think that we'll get more chances to partner up in the future. This isn't goodbye, Aventus. It's just 'until next time.'" At my sad expression, he leaned over and laid a hand on my shoulder. "I meant what I said before. I think that you could be one of the great assassins of the Era. You just need to get these foolish ideas of heroism out of your head."

"Thanks for the advice, Garnag," I muttered. Something in my voice must have moved him, because he finally sighed and spoke up.

"Look, before we leave, I'll have Elbent see if he can't find some information about the thieves," he allowed. "Would that make you happy?"

"Garnag," I replied, "you have no idea."

We spend the rest of the night chatting and drinking, leaving me to stumble back to the college just before sunrise and grab a couple of hours of sleep before rousting myself for morning classes. When I got up, there was a note on my desk from Ataf saying that he had found something waiting for me outside the door when he went out for breakfast. There was a sealed envelope that I had no doubt held information from our gruff Breton, and a single red mountain flower.

I breathed in its fragrance and thought of Eiruki. I wondered when I would see her again. I didn't have any illusions about our relationship. We were siblings in the Night Mother's service who sometimes found comfort in each other's arms. There was nothing more to it than that.

Still, it was nice to know that someone out there was thinking of me.

…to be continued…


	4. Thieves in the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus goes looking for Finn's Lute and finds trouble instead. The theft at the Bards College is only the beginning of a deeper plot, one that the young assassin is unprepared to deal with.

Chapter 4: Thieves in the Night

 

It felt good to be out on the road again.

After almost a month in the Bards College—spending my days learning about music and history, and my nights practicing the mandolin and fending off Ataf's efforts at conversation—I had been feeling more than a little stir crazy. Getting to spend a night with my family had helped. Seeing Garnag again had done wonders for my morale, and Eiruki…

Well, Eiruki was a more complicated sort of well-being, but it had been good to see her too.

Still, even seeing my family again had come with a pall of gloom. Garnag and the others were on the road to High Rock, in what I felt was a sort of exile. Cicero had beaten Eiruki almost to death, and now she and the others were being sent away. It galled me, the things that Hecate let that clown get away with. But even Garnag and Eiruki hadn't seemed all that angry at him. Garnag just pushed it off on him being the Keeper, while Eiruki hadn't even wanted to talk about it with me.

The next pair of days had seen me champing at the bit to do some violence on the deserving. I think Ataf had noticed my mood being worse than usual, because he stayed well out of my way for the rest of the week. Finally, when Fredas had come and we were given liberty to leave the campus, I had immediately gone to Braste, our floor matron. She was a dotty old Nord lady and nearsighted as a stone, but she had a sweet disposition that made it hard to be mad on those occasions she couldn't tell me apart from Ataf.

After a brief and somewhat muddled conversation, I had managed to convey to her that I was going out for the weekend and wouldn't be back until late Sundas night. She had given me a leave pass, stamped it, and toddled off back to whatever it was she did when there weren't students to tend to.

From there, it had been a short jog over to Proudspire Manor to pick up my horse, Spot, and Pavot, the ice wolf loaned to me by Babette. I waved once to Jordis, the manor's housecarl, then threw myself and my saddlebags on to Spot's back and raced off to the edge of Solitude.

The feeling of freedom that came over me as I rode out of the city, Pavot racing at Spot's heels, was indescribable. After spending all of Hearthfire hemmed in by walls and rules, the ride across the frosty hills and roads of western Skyrim was like flying. Even though it was cold and damp, the sun peeking out from behind a shroud of grey only occasionally, I still felt buoyed up from within by a surge of warmth.

Once the feeling of joy had started to lessen into mere satisfaction, I slowed down my pace and scanned the horizon. I only had two days to find Finn's Lute and bring it back to the Bards College; if I didn't show up for classes on Morndas, there would be hell to pay. Still, given the information I had received from Elbent, I didn't feel like it would be too much of a challenge.

From what my Breton brother had managed to find out, the lute had been taken from the college by a couple of Solitude locals, a pair of brothers named Atrius and Coccius. They were two nobodies from the docks who had managed to get jobs on the college's cleaning staff. They had been picking up stray valuables and selling them for most of the last year. Given that they went missing at the same time as Finn's Lute—and right after the staff was getting ready to open an investigation into the minor thefts—they were a shoo-in for the robbery. Inge Six-Fingers was too important to know that cutlery was going missing from the kitchens; she had only known about the lute.

The lute was the sort of score that morons would love and anyone with half a brain would avoid like the plague. It was too famous to pawn for what it was worth, but wouldn't be worth anything at all without its fame and age being known. Small-timers wouldn't have the connections they needed to fence the thing, and big-timers wouldn't take something so obvious without a buyer. I trusted Elbent enough that if there had been a buyer lined up for the lute, he would have sniffed them out.

Elbent had been thorough. The two morons had a cousin with ties to some local bandits; he lived in a shanty a few hours ride southeast of the city. If they had fled Solitude ahead of the law, that's where they would be going. They hadn't been gone long either. I had to remember to send Elbent a nice thank-you letter when I was done with this, maybe on good vellum with some dried nightshade. His information was just as good as any dossier that Nazir had ever given me, and he had put it together in less than six hours. The man was astonishing.

That put my opposition at two lowlifes with a penchant for drinking and brawling, out of their element and on the run, plus an equally lowlife bandit relation who was currently on the outs with his gang. If I was lucky, they'd be drinking off whatever they got for hocking an old lute and the silverware they had taken. I could catch up to them, take one alive for questioning, then leave them all for the crows. If I was especially lucky, they would have just kept the damned thing, and I'd be able to take it off their corpses.

Of course, I didn't exactly have a history of good luck, which is why I was armed to the teeth.

The saddlebags thrown over Spot's back held a brace of daggers, a full-sized flanged mace, a hunting bow in case I needed food while I was on the road, a couple of dozen arrows, and everything from my chest back at school. I was carrying enough poison to kill a village, as well as basic traveling supplies. As soon as I was out of sight of civilization, I would make a quick stopover to change into my armor.

My personal suit was a set of reinforced leather armor with scale mail interwoven into the breastplate, bracers, and greaves, all done up in the red-and-black of the Dark Brotherhood. It was light enough to cover up with a cloak in case I came across people I didn't intend to kill while I was traveling, but Hecate's skill at the forge had made it strong enough to stop a crossbow bolt at point-blank range. After almost getting killed by a werewolf a month ago, Hecate had made it her personal goal to make a suit of armor that wouldn't impede my movement but was strong enough to keep me alive in the thick of the worst she could imagine. I was looking forward to testing it out.

Despite my gung-ho attitude, I knew I had to be cautious. I was still recovering from my tangle with the creature that had almost killed me. My ribs were cracked, I had bruises on most of my body, and it occasionally hurt deep in my gut and lower back if I lifted anything heavy. Babette had given me a regimen of physical therapy to follow, which I had worked into my daily exercises, and my recovery was going very well. She probably wouldn't approve of me haring off after some thieves while I was still hurt. I rationalized it as keeping in practice while I wasn't taking contracts, but the truth was that I was just plain bored.

I tightened my grip on Spot's reins, kicked him into a gallop again, and relished my freedom.

It was twilight by the time I found the cabin the three thieves were holed up at. A few flakes of snow were drifting lazily from the sky, but it didn't look like it was going to stick. When I spied smoke coming from a rough stone chimney, I tied up Spot to a tree a few hundred yards back, then pulled up my cowl and hood before creeping back.

Full dark had almost come on by the time I reached the edge of the cabin's clearing. From the woods to the back of the house was my best approach, but it still involved crossing almost a dozen yards with no cover. A little light spilled out from between the shuttered windows on the rear of the cabin; they were probably closed up tight against the weather. I decided that if they could see me through an inch of wood and in the dark, they deserved the forewarning.

The crossing to the cabin was quick and easy, but as I sidled up to the wall, I could hear growling coming from within. I tensed at the idea of having to fight another werewolf, but then I realized that they just had a dog inside with them. I smiled; I had a pet of my own. I clucked my tongue to call Pavot up out of the woods, and the great ice wolf dashed over to where I hunkered down, pressing his furry body up against mine. I enjoyed his warmth while I pulled out a knife and quietly pried apart the outer wall's sloppy boards. The knife came back covered in pitch, but I had managed to open a hole maybe an inch or two across. Pushing my eye up to the hole ruined my night vision, but it was a necessary evil. At least I had Pavot to watch my back.

Through my peephole, I could make out one room of a two-room shanty cabin. A firepit crackled away merrily in the middle of the room, a pot of stew boiling above it. A sour-looking Imperial man sat directly across the fire from me, warming his hands between stirring the stew. A mangy cur was curled up next to his feet, licking its chops and casting furtive glances at the stew pot.

"You got that rabbit chopped up yet?" the man called out to someone in the other room.

"Coming now," came back the laconic reply. "Don't twist yourself up."

"Easy for you to say," he grumbled, more to himself than for the sake of whoever he was talking to. "You're not the one had to go gadding about in the cold to catch a single measly gods-damned hare."

"Quit your bitching, Atrius," said the younger man who came walking in from the other room. His tone was even and sweet, the sort of tone someone took when they were intentionally winding up the listener. He must be Coccius then; the family resemblance was too close to be anything but brothers. "You hate cooking, so you got to hunt instead. Would you rather we starve?"

"We'll starve anyway if Vimier doesn't get back soon," Atrius groused as he scooted over to make room for his brother at the stewpot. "Where in Oblivion is that lunk?"

"Probably out on a raid," Coccius replied in a long-suffering tone, "like I must have said about a dozen times already."

Coccius leaned down to the fire and began to scrape pieces of chopped rabbit into the cast-iron pot. A stray piece escaped his grasp, and the dog lunged for it. Before the dog got halfway to the meat, Coccius lashed out with one booted foot, catching the mongrel in the ribs. The dog whined as it rolled away from the abuse, slinking out of reach. Coccius' expression never changed. I found myself frowning in disapproval; I didn't like it when people hurt animals. Coccius reached down, picked up the piece of rabbit meat, and tossed it on into the stew.

"By the Eight!" cried Atrius. "That's disgusting."

"Every little bit helps," Coccius returned mildly. "If your hound wants food so badly, it can go get its own dinner."

"Malus is a town dog," the older brother whined, throwing an arm around the whimpering mutt's neck. "He don't know how to hunt."

"Well, he had better learn," the sallow-faced Coccius responded. "That goes double for you, big brother. We might be town dogs, but we need to become wolves now if we're going to make it out here." The waver in his tone might have gone unnoticed by his brother, but I could hear it just fine. He was scared too—and well he should be. Tonight was going to be the last night of his life.

I decided that subtlety was in no way necessary. Two men, neither currently armed, no armor to speak of, with a mangy dog. I had lucked out—for a change. I would burst in the door, kill Coccius, and beat Atrius until he told me what I wanted to know…

I paused suddenly, thinking about what I was doing. I was planning on murdering two men who had done nothing worse—as far as I knew—than steal some silverware and kick a dog. It was one thing to wield a blade in the Night Mother's name, but was it okay to just murder people because it was convenient? I knew that most of my siblings in the Dark Brotherhood would consider that a perk of the job. I had even thought about how nice it would be to break some heads on the way over here myself.

Nazir's voice echoed in my head, chastising me for my bout of conscience. Cicero's voice mocked me for being afraid of blood. In the end, it was Hecate's voice that won out—the voice that told me that I had a good heart, and that she loved me for it. The nagging worry wouldn't go away, though. Hecate might say that she loved me for having a conscience, but she clearly loved Cicero more—and he was a monster, through and through.

Having decided to give these two morons a chance at life, I fell back on Garnag's lessons. He said that the best assassins were the ones with flair and panache. While he hadn't been speaking of murderers, Headmaster Viarmo had said something similar about bards. I pulled my flanged mace and tossed my cloak onto the nearby woodpile. For what I was about to do, I needed my armor to be visible for maximum impact.

Creeping around to the front door, I gestured for Pavot to heel to me and watch my back. I probably wouldn't need his help dispatching these two if it came to that, but the ice wolf would be a useful lookout in case their cousin showed back up unexpectedly. I stood, keeping my body in line with the door, and lashed out with my foot into the area right below the door handle. The front door tore off of its latch like rotten paper, crashing open and drawing both men's attention.

In the moment after I paused in the doorway, wondering if my gambit was going to work or if I had just given up the element of surprise for nothing, the two men dropped to the ground. The pot's ladle clattered out of Atrius' hand, spilling rabbit stew onto the rotten floorboards. Both men were blubbering and weeping, holding up their hands in surrender. They clearly recognized my armor, and it had far more of an impact than I had suspected it would. I guess killing the Emperor of Tamriel made people decide we were scary again after all. Some of my targets had tried to beg or bargain their way out of death before, but never with such abject fear. It almost made me feel sort of sorry for them.

"Oh gods!" cried Atrius. "Don't kill us! We didn't do nothing!"

"Please!" wept Coccius overlapping with his brother. "I don't want to die!"

I let them blubber on for a moment. Even their whipped old hound dog was cowering in the corner of the room, its paws over its muzzle and its eyes closed.

"Enough!" I finally growled in my most threatening voice after I had let them stew for a few moments. "You are the brothers Atrius and Coccius, correct?"

"No, sir!" screeched Atrius. "That ain't us! You got us mixed up with someone else!"

"Save your pleading," I snarled. "The Dark Brotherhood does not make mistakes."

"What do you want with us?" gulped Coccius, snot and tears mixing on his chin.

"You have one chance to live. The lute you two stole from the Bards College," I said evenly. "Where is it?"

"That old thing?" Atrius asked, confused. "What you want that for?"

"I'm asking the questions here!" I shouted. I slammed my mace into the wall of the cabin, shattering a board and bringing a new bout of crying from the two weasely brothers.

"Sorry, sir!" Coccius shrieked. "My brother didn't mean anything by it." He gulped, apparently dreading to tell me what he knew. "It's just… We sold it already." I nodded; I hadn't expected anything less. My lucky streak had been too good to be true already. I just needed the name of the pawn shop they had ditched it at, then I could be on my way.

"Where?" I demanded, smacking my mace into my hand for emphasis. I didn't usually enjoy pushing people around quite so much, but I guess attending the Bards College had improved my appreciation for theatricality.

"Sold it to that fat nobleman what's got his nose up Elisif's sweet ass," Atrius grumbled. "Bastard paid us a few coins to steal it out of a display case. Wasn't locked or nothing."

"Son of a bitch cheated us," Coccius added. "If we'd known the college would fuss so much over one old lute, we would have asked for more." He suddenly looked at me askance, his eyes still watery with fear. "Did someone… you know?"

"Did someone what?" I asked, keeping my voice low and threatening, wondering who the noble they were talking about might be.

"We didn't figure the lute was worth that much," Atrius mewled. "Thane Erikur said that it had sentimental value to his family, that the bards was keeping it from him. We didn't think they'd notice, since we put another one in its place. Certainly didn't think it was worth someone calling the Black Sacrament on us." He started tearing up again, then he and Coccius held onto one another and just began to weep.

I sighed inside; if they had been taken in by such a shoddy story—and tried such a slipshod cover—then they were even dumber than I thought. Killing them would be like spearing fish in a barrel.

"You are not my targets," I intoned, lowering my mace slightly. It would put them at ease, but it wouldn't make their deaths any slower if they tried anything. "No one has called the Sacrament against you."

"Thank the gods!" cried Coccius as he held onto his brother like a drowning man clutching at driftwood.

"All eight of 'em!" shouted Atrius. "Hell, thank Talos too while we're at it!"

"Silence!" I shouted, bringing their eyes back to me. "You may not be my targets, but if I find out that you've lied to me, or if you get in my way…" I gestured, and Pavot slunk into the cabin next to me, his eyes glowing red in the firelight. He growled and bared his teeth. "There would be no place in all of Tamriel you could hide from the Dark Brotherhood. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir!" they cried in unison, shaking and shivering.

"Some advice for you," I said as I tucked the mace into my belt. "You're not cut out for banditry, either of you. Go back to civilization and find real jobs. If I ever run into either of you again, and you're not exactly on the straight and level, I'll kill you both." I started to walk out the doorway, then paused and turned back. "And don't ever kick that dog again."

Their jaws dropped open, wondering how I had known about something that happened well before I arrived, but before they could say anything I was already back out in the night.

As I rode back toward Solitude through the worsening autumn flurries, freshly changed back into my normal traveling clothes, I wondered if I had done the right thing by not killing Atrius and Coccius. Most of the Brotherhood would have taken my sparing them as a sign of weakness. I didn't think so, though. While I didn't mind killing—even enjoyed it, after a fashion, when it was done for good reasons—I didn't revel in it the same way that many of my adopted siblings did.

I had gone over the necessaries in my head several times before the lights of the city came back into view. They had never seen my face. They didn't know my real voice. They weren't involved in any aspect of a contract. Nazir might have killed them "just in case" and Cicero might have killed them "just because," but neither of those were good enough reasons for me to take a life. The Dark Brotherhood might have the Five Tenets, but I was learning that I had my own code to follow too.

It wasn't like they had been useless to me either. They had told me the name of their buyer, and that he was a thane in the jarl's court. The entire thing disturbed me. I had assumed that they wouldn't have a real buyer, especially since Elbent hadn't uncovered any hint of a client. Anything this big should have gone through the Thieves Guild, our sister organization, and neither of those idiots had been Guild-affiliated. Honestly, the Guild had been somewhat down on its luck lately; even so, I didn't think they would resort to hiring that low on the food chain. Either the Thieves Guild didn't exist in Solitude anymore, forcing a buyer to hire outside contractors, or the buyer had done an end-run around the Guild to avoid paying their fees.

Also, the fact that this "Erikur" was in Jarl Elisif's court was a worrisome notion. I knew that being a thane was largely a ceremonial position, but it still carried weight with traditional Nords. At least, that was what Hecate had told me when I asked her about her title a while back. The entire political system was kind of a mystery to me. Current events had never been one of my strong suits.

If I wanted Finn's Lute back, I would have to figure out who Erikur was, find out why he had taken it, and discover where he was keeping it. This seemed more and more like something that I couldn't hash out in a single weekend. On the positive side, the buyer being a person of importance in Solitude meant that it was more likely he was keeping it for personal reasons, rather than trying to resell it at a profit. That meant that the lute would be staying in Solitude, probably in his home since it was a known stolen object and he wouldn't be able to display it publicly.

I trotted my horse up to the gates of the city, dismounting before I reached the guards and bringing Pavot to heel. They recognized me from when I had left earlier, so getting back into the city was no problem. No sooner had I entered the gates than I suddenly felt bone-weary. The long ride, the physical exertion, and the continuing strain on my body from my long recovery had worn me out. The walk back to the Bards College seemed like too far to even think about. Before my conscious mind had made the decision, my feet were already carrying me toward Proudspire Manor, which was closer by several blocks.

I let myself into the private lower stables with Hecate's borrowed house key. I didn't see Shadowmere in residence, though that meant less than it might considering that the demon horse had an uncanny knack for disappearing and reappearing. Still, it was most likely that the Listener had not made a last-minute trip into the city without telling me. I threw a load of hay into the first stall for Spot, poured a bucket of water, then pulled out some old hides into the other stall for Pavot; I promised myself to bring him down some meat from the pantry first thing in the morning.

I staggered into the basement through the back door, throwing the bolt behind me as I let myself in. I blinked against the darkness; it had been dim in the stable, but the basement was nearly pitch black. I stumbled around, looking for a lantern, when my toe banged into something hard and unyielding. I yelped and danced around, knocking over what felt like a stack of metal ingots. The crashing noise made me wince, and the sudden appearance of a bright light in front of me made me stagger back drunkenly.

"Stop, thief!" shouted a woman's voice, just before a body collided with mine, sending me reeling backward.

Anxious to not split my skull open on a sharp protrusion of any sort, I lashed out to grab whatever I could. The closest thing was my assailant; I got a good handful of the front of her shirt and almost managed to right myself before the fabric gave way. The woman pulled away from me, dropping the lantern she carried, and both of us wound up flat on our asses about ten feet apart. As my eyes finally adjusted to the light, I realized that I was holding most of the front of her nightshirt and she wasn't wearing anything under it.

"Jordis!" I shouted looking away from the mostly-naked housecarl. "It's me! Aventus!"

"Aventus?" she said groggily, as though she had bumped her head. She made no move to cover up as she asked, "What are you doing here?" She paused, thinking about it a moment. "Not that you don't have a right to be here. I mean, it's your home and all. I just wasn't expecting you tonight, and certainly not sneaking in like a burglar."

"Jordis," I said calmly, continuing to avert my eyes, "your shirt is torn open." She looked down, seeming to notice the torn clothes for the first time, and pulled a hand up to her mouth in surprise.

"Gods!" she cried. "I didn't mean to show you anything indecent!" She stood up like a shot, trying in vain to clutch her ripped nightgown together with one hand while using the other to pull herself upright. This was made more difficult by the fact that she kept alternating hands to try and fumble for the lantern she had dropped. Thank the Night Mother it hadn't broken, or we might have had to deal with being on fire on top of everything else. "Now Diana will think that I'm trying to corrupt her son, like in one of those trashy romance novels, and she'll hate me and send me away!"

Jordis staggered over to me, finally having managed to balance the lantern on the lip of a forge. She threw her arms around my neck and started crying, bawling incoherently about how this was all she had and she didn't mean to mistake me for a thief and don't tell my mother and she was sorry and she didn't know how this had happened. If I could have gotten a word in edgewise, I would have tried to reassure her that it was entirely my fault, but she was too busy falling apart. I was also, perhaps, not in the best position to comfort a half-naked woman only a few years older than me pressed up against me while I was exhausted. In the end, all I could manage to do was pat her on the back awkwardly while muttering "There, there."

Finally, Jordis stopped sniffling and leaned up from my shoulder. Her lips hovered near my ear, her breath brushing my cheek.

"I think I got snot on your shirt," she whispered.

I sighed and patted her on the back again. I suppose, all in all, a bruised tailbone and a dirty shirt had been a small price to pay for the day's activities.

Waking up in my overstuffed bed in Proudspire Manor was a very different experience for me.

It was my first night sleeping over in the house, and I couldn't get over how quiet it was. Living in Sanctuary—even back when it was just the six of us, back at the beginning—there was some amount of noise all the time. Even in the middle of the night, Babette would be up and about, working on her potions or poisons. The Bards College was a big building and our floor was mostly empty, but there were people above and below us, and the building itself made noises.

Proudspire Manor had been constructed of stout stone and fine wood, and the loudest noise in the whole place was Jordis coming upstairs early to make breakfast for us both. The sound of her clattering around in the kitchen woke me right away; I'm a light sleeper at the best of times, and sleeping in a strange bed had left me restless. The bed was comfortable… but it wasn't me. The house was a place for a wealthy socialite, a role that Hecate occasionally had to play, nothing more.

"Good morning, Jordis," I said as I came downstairs, hoping that the housecarl wouldn't still be upset about the night before.

"Good morning, Aventus," she replied with a jaunty smile. "I made breakfast!" I noticed with some confusion that she was wearing her usual armor, but with a chef's apron over it and a cooking mitt on one hand. Despite the clash and clatter that had been coming from the kitchen, everything still seemed like it was in one piece. I sat down at the table as Jordis laid out a plate for me.

"Aren't you joining me?" I asked when I noticed that she hadn't set a place for herself.

"Oh, it wouldn't be proper," she responded. "A good housecarl sees to her own needs last. At least, that's what Falk always says." At my questioning glance, she continued, "Falk Firebeard. He's Jarl Elisif's steward. He oversaw my training as a housecarl."

"Jordis," I started as she spooned out some runny-looking eggs, "clearly you know people in the court better than I do. I mean, I've never had to deal with politics before, so I'm pretty lost about this sort of stuff. Do you think you could help me catch up? With Diana—my mother, I mean—involved with the court again, I'll need all the help I can get."

"Hmm," she murmured thoughtfully. "I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask. If I were any good at politics myself, I probably wouldn't be a housecarl."

"What do you mean?" I asked. I took a bit of the eggs; the taste made me realize I was spoiled by Nazir's cooking.

"Well, just…" she trailed off. She put the pan back on the stove and sat down at the table with a wan smile. "I was originally supposed to get married off to a minor nobleman to cement an alliance between our families. But during our engagement party, I wound up annoying him so badly that he broke it off. My father was so mad at me, but Elisif managed to convince him that I was better off following my dreams as a sword maiden."

"So you're from a noble family?"

"Only by marriage," she responded. "We were originally just a well-respected clan, but my uncle's whole family was elevated when Elisif married Torygg."

"Wait," I said, trying to get the family relationships right. "You mean you're related to Jarl Elisif."

"Didn't I say that?" she asked, confused. "We're cousins. Our fathers are brothers. We were raised together here in Solitude. My uncle Oskar—Elisif's father—was a diplomat for the Empire, so we spent a lot of time in the Blue Palace as children. It's how she and Torygg met."

"So you're perfect to explain the court to me," I said cheerfully.

"I think you might be better off with someone else," Jordis said nervously. "I'll do it if you ask… but I'm really supposed to stay near the manor to protect your mother's things. I don't want to risk something happening…" She trailed off, looking twitchy and upset. I thought that maybe she was more worried about dealing with the court than thieves breaking in, so I didn't push it anymore.

After breakfast, I wandered out onto the back porch, brushing snow off the landing as I went. A light dusting was quickly being burned off by the morning sun, but it was still a little too cold to strip my shirt off for my morning exercises. I went through my usual routine, taking it easier than usual because of my exertion the previous night.

The routine ate up time, and when I finished, breathing heavily and sweating, I was surprised to hear applause from behind me. Turning around, I recognized the young man standing there was Frothar, Balgruuf's eldest son. He was on his family's back porch, leaning lazily on the railing as he clapped.

"I didn't want to interrupt," he said jauntily, "so now that you're done: good morning."

"Good morning," I replied, his cheerful tone and smiling demeanor making me grin in return. "Do you always watch people exercising without their knowledge?"

"Only my neighbors," he laughed, vaulting up onto the railing and leaping across to my side. He landed firmly in the snow, not slipping a bit. I had always envied the ability of Nords to ignore the cold, and to move on ice and snow like dry land. It was a knack I had never quite gotten. "Truthfully, I hadn't expected to see you when I came out for my morning constitutional. I thought you were up at the Bards College."

"I was," I started. "I mean, I am. I just needed a day off—out of the school." I laughed nervously. Talking one on one with normal people was still a little new for me. It was rare I could have a conversation with someone that I wasn't threatening or forced to share quarters with. "I was feeling a little cooped up."

"You and my brother both," Frothar chuckled, sitting down on one of the stone benches. "You're still doing better than him, though." He sighed, shaking his head. "You at least started classes. Nelkir just decided to not go, and Father was too busy with the war effort to put the time toward forcing him."

"Nelkir was supposed to be attending the college?" I asked. "I knew we were supposed to have another student who dropped out at the last minute. I didn't realize it was your brother."

"No reason for you to," he continued. "It wasn't common knowledge outside of the family and the staff. And I'm pretty sure Viarmo still likes my father enough to not smear his youngest son for being a layabout."

"I didn't mean-" I started, waving my hands apologetically.

"No worries," Frothar laughed. "You didn't say it. I did. Nelkir is a good kid, but he has no ambition, no drive. All he wants to do is run around town all day, spending Father's coin and associating with the lower class. I dread to think if the boy's discovered women yet. Divines know what sort of doxies he might take up with."

My back stiffened despite Frothar's jovial tone. My mother—my real mother, Naalia Aretino—had been a prostitute, like one of the "doxies" that Frothar was so glib about demeaning. It drove home for me that Balgruuf's eldest son might be funny and charming, but he was still a Nord—and a Nord nobleman at that. I had grown up in poverty and want, on the verge of starving, with the few coins in our home bought by my mother's tears and pain. And this smiling bastard-

I realized that I was clenching my fists and shaking. Frothar hadn't noticed yet, too busy still complaining about his brother's antics. I forced myself to calm down, breathing deeply and stilling my face. By the time Frothar looked at me again, I was smiling pleasantly. My mask was back in place. I cursed myself a fool for letting it slip in the first place. Maybe Hecate had been right; the Bards College could wind up being a good experience for me.

"So, are you going to be at Proudspire more often?" he asked courteously.

"I haven't decided yet," I waffled. "Mostly, I just needed to get out of my dormitory for a while. I've been thinking about…" I trailed off, not sure if I wanted to ask a favor from someone I had just recently met. At his expectant look, I finally continued. "My mother wants me to brush up on courtly matters so that I can keep her up to date about what's going on in the capital. But the truth is that I don't know much of anything about the jarl's court."

"The High Queen's court soon enough," came a lilting voice from across the way. Frothar and I both looked toward the voice, and a beaming smile crossed the young man's face.

"Little sister!" he cried. "Jump across and join us! Clearly, you already consider yourself part of the conversation."

"Jump?" Dagny sniffed. "I think not. Even if I could make the leap, I'd ruffle my dress."

"And dislodge your breakfast, I have no doubt," her brother retorted. "Fine then, we'll come to you."

Frothar stood, brushing frost from his pants, and turned toward his sister. Dagny shrieked and backed away from the railing quickly, knowing what he planned to do. He looked at me and nodded. Once again, his easygoing manner was infectious, and I found myself running alongside him as he dashed for the railing. He was closer but I was faster, so we reached the rail at the same time, both of us leaping up onto it and launching ourselves across. Frothar landed perfectly just beyond the rail on the other side, while I dropped to a knee and forward-rolled to bleed off the momentum. I wound up right in front of Dagny, up on one knee with my hands flat on the ground.

As I looked up at Dagny, she drew a hand up to her mouth, brushing away a strand of dark blonde hair from her cheek with the other. A flush spread on her cheeks, and I wondered if she was just less resistant to the cold than other Nords.

"You should stand up before she thinks you're proposing," Frothar teased as he walked toward me. He held out a hand and helped me up as Dagny snorted in irritation. "Tricking a suitor into marriage is the only way she could attract a man, what with the way those sweetrolls keep going to her thighs." Dagny slapped her brother on the arm as he howled with laughter.

"Just because your tastes run toward those rail-thin Imperial girls," she hissed, "don't think that I couldn't get a man if I wanted to."

"Fine, fine," he chuckled as he walked toward the inner door. "I have to go now. I have a long day touring the troops with Father and General Tullius. Aventus here was saying that he needs someone to teach him about court etiquette. Since you don't have anything to do, why not show him around?"

Dagny turned to look at me with apprising eyes, looking me up and down like a butcher with a side of beef. Despite being fully clothed, I felt unaccountably naked in front of her gaze. Finally, she looked over at her brother.

"All right then," she said, bringing a look of surprise to both of our faces. "I'll do it."

"Thank you, little sister," he replied, coming back long enough to give her an affectionate peck on the forehead. "Perhaps I'll see you at court later, Aventus?"

"Not today at least," she quickly interrupted. She turned to me. "No offense, but you talk like a yokel and I doubt you even own court clothes. Today is just making sure that you'll eventually be presentable. I wonder if Radiant Raiment is open on Sundas…"

As she continued to talk, Frothar laughed once more and walked out. I cast a desperate look at his back as he walked away, wondering what I had gotten myself into…

…to be continued…


	5. The Art of the Possible

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus trains in the arts of politics, learning that words can cut as deeply as knives. Can the boy assassin survive in the cutthroat courts of Solitude?

Chapter 5: The Art of the Possible

 

I stalked through the unfamiliar terrain, moving like a shadow between the many dangers that stood between me and my prey. I could catch glimpses of it through the moving obstacles, just enough to whet my appetite for the final movements of our chase. I tensed as I began to approach, careful of my footwork. I got close enough to touch, began to reach out…

"Aventus," came Dagny's disapproving voice, "why are you going back to the buffet table again?"

I sighed, dropping my hand before I could grab another of the small shrimp puffs that only seemed to abate my hunger for moments before it came back, as strong as before.

"I'm hungry," I complained.

"It's rude to hover near the appetizers. You're probably used to going hungry, what with growing up poor," she said. I gawped at her until she reached out and pushed up my lower jaw with an outstretched finger. I simply couldn't believe that she had said something like that, considering that she went into withdrawal if she tried to go a day without a sweetroll. "Don't look at me like that," she chided. "Consider it a compliment. You've got an advantage over all of these overfed diplomats."

"And overfed spoiled princesses," I muttered.

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that," Dagny sniffed. She reached down and smoothed the front of her dress, an Imperial-style creation in ruffled blue. "If you really want to learn to represent your mother in the court, you have to be mindful of the habits and manners of the people here."

I looked around at the gathering in the great hall of the Blue Palace. I still felt like a deer in a gathering of wolves, a sensation I wasn't used to feeling. I was normally the wolf in sheep's clothing, the shadow in the night. In this place, I was out of my depth. Honestly, I was grateful for Dagny taking an interest in my well-being, especially considering that I was lying to her. I didn't give two damns about courtly life or the lives of the high-born. I was just trying to be in a position to find out more about a man named Erikur, apparently a thane of Solitude.

"My mother doesn't care about courtly manners," I argued as Dagny took my arm and led me away from the buffet. I gave it a longing look as we departed.

"Your mother is the Dragonborn," she whispered. "She can afford to not care about anyone's opinion. You'll get no such allowances for being her son—and an adopted one, at that. Even if you weren't so insistent about not being public about it." We had managed to agree to not spread around my "parentage" to more people that already knew it. As far as anyone who wasn't already in the know would care, I was just a student at the Bards College that Dagny had chosen as her escort for this party. "Honestly, you'd have an easier time of it if you just came out and said who you were. Not much of one, but…"

"If I told everyone who I really was," I said, "I would suddenly have a bunch of enemies whose faces and names I didn't know." I shook my head. "No, it's better if I'm just Aventus Aretino of the Bards College for now. Maybe when the civil war dies down a little…"

"You really think the civil war is going to die down?" she asked, a cynical note in her voice.

Given how wealthy and important they still were, I sometimes managed to forget that Dagny's family had lost their home and position to Ulfric Stormcloak. They were guests of Jarl Elisif, along with several other banished jarls. Dagny's father, Jarl Balgruuf the Greater, held a position of respect and authority among them due to his unflagging loyalty to the Empire, but it was still a position of first among exiles.

"Of course," I said with real confidence. "Now that Diana has rejoined the war effort and Ulfric's Dragonborn has been outed as a fake, it's only a matter of time until his own people start turning against him."

"I think you put too much faith in people's willingness to reject a pleasant lie," she returned. Dagny paused, cocking her head to one side. All at once, her cynical attitude faded away and she was just a fourteen-year-old girl again, holding onto my arm with a delighted smile. "I love this song!" she declared. "Dance with me!"

"Um," I started as she dragged me toward the dance floor. We were already among the couples gathered in their finery before I managed to choke out, "Dagny, I don't know how to dance."

"Oh, pooh," she pouted. "You don't know anything useful, do you?"

"I wouldn't say that," I muttered, thinking of the dozen ways I knew how to kill a man bare-handed. I looked down at her; she had her cheeks puffed out in disappointment, a sight that couldn't help but make me laugh. "I'm willing to learn if you'll teach me," I finally allowed.

"Let's see how fast you learn," Dagny replied, her mercurial face twisting into a cunning smile. I gulped, wondering for not the first time what I had gotten myself into with this girl.

"You certainly dragged the cat in this time, dearie," complained the freakishly tall, gold-skinned woman looming over me. She wasn't talking to me, though; she was talking to Dagny while she looked at me like a piece of garbage stuck to someone's shoe. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as she appraised me, and my teeth ground together at her words.

"I think you hit a nerve, sister dear," said the woman behind the counter. Looking her way, I could see that the two Altmer women had enough resemblance that they had to be actual sisters, not just the way I used the word when I talked about Meena or Babette.

"I'm not used to being insulted by shopkeepers," I snarled.

"Oh, it's not an insult, boy," returned the woman standing before me. "One must be honest with one's failings before one can improve." I paused, thinking about it. Nazir had said something very similar to me once. Of course, he had been deciding if I could be trained as a killer, but the sentiment was the same.

"They're like this with everyone," Dagny assured me, patting me on the arm. I didn't yet know what Dagny was going to get out of helping me get in good with the court, but I would do what I had to do. Erikur might not be an actual target, but I had made a promise to myself that I would recover Finn's Lute for the college. If I had to endure being dragged into clothing shops and mocked by elf women—well, I had been through far worse.

"Not everyone, dear girl," the woman was saying to Dagny. "Only the ones who need it."

"Shamefully," added her sister, "that includes nearly everyone in Skyrim."

"Aventus Aretino," Dagny said, "allow me to introduce you to Taarie and Endarie, the brilliant designers behind Radiant Raiment."

"Brilliant, she says!" the one called Taarie preened, clearly pleased by the praise.

"Taarie, Endarie," Dagny continued, "this is Aventus Aretino. He's-"

"Just a friend of Dagny's," I interrupted, shooting her a warning look. She glared back at me in confusion and annoyance. I got the impression that Dagny wasn't used to being interrupted. "She said that if I wanted to make a good impression at court, I needed to come here first."

"Well, the girl may be young," Endarie crooned, "but she has impeccable taste." She looked me up and down again; I had gotten used to being taller than almost everyone I met, but the Altmer woman stood head and shoulders above me. "I think that we can come up with something to improve on your natural good looks, rough as they are."

I blushed at being called good looking. It wasn't a way I thought of myself. I generally preferred to let my deeds carry me instead of anything as superficial as my looks, especially since I had spent the last several years training how to be unseen. Being handsome was a liability for an assassin; it was better to be forgettable. When I looked at Dagny, she had an appraising expression that I didn't understand. It was shrewd and somehow possessive, like she was examining a horse she was thinking about buying.

"Why do I need new clothes anyway?" I complained to her in an effort to make her stop looking at me like that. "What's wrong with what I'm wearing?"

Endarie threw her hands up and walked away while Taarie made a noise somewhere between gagging and coughing. Dagny snickered at their reaction, making my red face burn even brighter.

"Look, Aventus," she said while the sisters began picking out swatches of cloth, "court is all about appearances. People are made and broken on the strength of their presentation." She tapped her lower lip with a finger, thinking about it. "If court is like a battle, then your clothes are your armor. They're the first thing people see about you, even before your hair color or even what race you are. You can win friends or make enemies just by choosing the right colors, or the wrong ones."

"Armor, huh?" I asked dumbly.

"It's all about making an impression," Dagny insisted. "And it's about making the impression you want to make."

I thought about the times I had worn my Dark Brotherhood leathers into battle, using them as a tool to terrify my prey before killing them. It was true that colors could win friends and influence people; in the last two years, I had grown to hate Stormcloak blue. I supposed that Dagny might have a point about clothes making the man.

"So once I get new clothes," I continued, "then we can go to the Blue Palace?"

Dagny laughed, a high and almost mocking note. She held a hand in front of her mouth as she laughed, like she was trying to hide her teeth. I frowned; I didn't like being laughed at.

"I'm sorry, Aventus," she said when she stopped cackling. "I don't mean to laugh, but new clothes will hardly get you ready for court. Your diction is still all wrong, for another thing."

"My what now?" I asked.

"Your diction," she repeated. "The way you talk. Don't they teach you public speaking at the Bards College?"

"That's not until next semester," I said almost automatically.

"Well, we'll need to work on it a bit sooner than that if you're going to be my escort," Dagny said airily.

"Escort?" I echoed, feeling lost. "To what? When?"

"Emperor's Day is coming up at the end of this month," she responded. "I need an escort for the dance they're holding at the Blue Palace. I figure that it's the least you can do for me, considering all the time I'll be taking to get you presentable."

"A whole month?" I asked. "You think it'll take me that long to be ready for court."

"If you're serious about representing your mother," Dagny whispered, clearly understanding that I didn't want the two Altmer women to know about my relationship with Diana, "that's a bare minimum. Most of the people you'll meet in the Blue Palace have been practicing politics their entire adult lives. Some have been part of one court or another since they were children. Letting you put on fancy clothes and teaching you to pronounce the 'g' sound at the end of words is hardly adequate to the task."

"It's just fancy people in fancy clothes," I groused as Taarie came back to start taking my measurements. "It's not like it's dangerous." Taarie barked laughter and Dagny looked at me very seriously.

"With an attitude like that," the chubby girl said darkly, "they'll eat you alive."

The pit of my stomach felt cold and uneasy at her declaration. Still, I had killed men and endured wounds worse than those suffered by many veteran soldiers. How bad could it be?

The next two weeks were worse than anything I could have imagined.

Not only were the clothes I bought from Radiant Raiment more expensive than anything I had ever worn before—barring, perhaps, my Dark Brotherhood armor—they were uncomfortable too. When I complained about it to Dagny, she would only say that a pig would find even silk uncomfortable the first time he wore it. I wound up purchasing half a dozen different outfits from the rude Altmer sisters

My days were consumed with my lessons at the Bards College, but my evenings were spent learning comportment and etiquette from Dagny. Every day after dinner, I would put my mandolin and notebook away in my room, change into one of the formal outfits I had bought, and run off to meet with her at Proudspire Manor. She would stalk around me like Cicero back when he was teaching me the proper stance for knife work, correcting my posture, my tone, even my facial expressions.

"You must really like this girl," Ataf said one night when I got home just as the gates were being locked up for curfew.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I responded.

"You never do," he complained.

"What does that mean?" I said, surprised to find that his words hurt.

"All I'm saying is that you never let anyone in," he said, turning from his desk to face me. "You've been here almost two months, and no one knows anything about you. You have breakfast and lunch with your classmates, but you don't talk to anyone else. You won't even admit that you're hiding anything, even though it's as obvious as the sun in the sky. Half the time, you skip dinner to leave campus. If it's to spend time with your girlfriend, I would understand-"

"She's not my girlfriend," I interrupted automatically.

"That's what I'm talking about!" he said with vehemence. "You spend a bunch of time with a girl you won't talk about. I only know it's a girl because you say 'her' sometimes. I live with you, and I don't know even know your parents' names, what they do, nothing. You're so gods-damned secretive, Aventus. I don't know why you think you have to be, but it's not winning you any friends around here."

"I'm not looking to make friends," I told him sullenly. "I never said that I was."

"Well, you've managed to make some anyway," Ataf grumbled, "totally in spite of yourself." He ran a hand through his short hair in frustration. "People can tell you're special, Aventus." He pointed a finger at me as I started to open my mouth. "And don't say you're not special. It drives me crazy when you say that."

"What do you want me to say, Ataf?" I near-shouted, driven to the edge by his constant prodding and Dagny's cutting commentary. "What do you want from me?"

"The truth, Aventus," he said softly. "Look, I've been trying to stay out of it because you didn't want to talk about it, but you keep getting more and more secretive. You disappear for hours on end, more and more frequently. You're buying fancy clothes and you come back upset. If you're in some kind of trouble, or in with a bad crowd, I want to know. I want to help."

"What are you talking about?" I said, genuinely confused.

"I've known some people who had to go through what you've gone through," he replied. "If your parents have been hurting you, then getting into more trouble isn't the way to deal with it."

"Wait," I said, holding up my hands. "You think that my parents… have been abusing me?"

"Don't treat me like an idiot, Aventus," he snapped. "Where else would you have gotten so many scars? And some of them from when you would have been just a little kid?"

Before I could stop it, the laughter came boiling out of me in a wave. I laid back on my bed and just let it come, cackling at the top of my lungs until tears streamed from my eyes. Ataf stared at me with wide, unbelieving eyes, and the expression on his face just made me laugh harder. I suddenly thought of Babette laughing at me when I thought I had discovered her "little secret," and that only made my gales of laughter worse.

When I was finally done, wiping tears from my eyes, Ataf had stopped gaping at me and was instead sitting with his arms crossed and an irritated look on his face.

"I'm sorry, Ataf," I told him, "I really am." I chuckled again, a last hiccup of humor escaping me. "I don't mean to laugh, but the idea that my family would ever hurt me, for any reason…" I paused; some of them had hurt me during training, and Cicero had beaten me senseless once. "Yeah, some of my scars are from them—but only from training." It almost wasn't a lie. At least, it was close enough that Ataf didn't see through it.

"Training?" he asked. "What kind of training?"

"My mother insisted that I learn how to fight when I was young," I said, only partially lying. "She wanted to make sure I could defend myself even when she wasn't around."

"All of those scars are from practice fights?" Ataf said dubiously.

"No, of course not," I allowed. "Most of them are from people trying to kill me." His jaw dropped open again, and I almost burst back into laughter.

There was something freeing about telling a story this close to the truth, even if it was the one Hecate had made up for me in case I had to tell someone. She had always said that I was such a bad liar that I needed to stick as close to the truth as possible. I was risking a lot by letting Ataf into my confidence, but I couldn't keep him at arm's length forever. If there was anything that I was picking up from Dagny's crash course lessons, it was that friends were too valuable a commodity to throw away without good cause.

"I'm adopted, Ataf," I said, pulling myself up into a sitting position. "When I was little, my real mom got sick and died. I never knew my dad. I got put into an orphanage, and the headmistress…" I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of Grelod the Kind. "She wasn't kind at all to us kids."

"Aventus, you don't have to-" Ataf started, but I cut him off.

"You wanted to hear it, so you're going to hear it." I paused, think of what exactly to tell my roommate. "She beat us, starved us, visited all kinds of cruelty on us. No one should have to hear about the details of what she did, let alone live through it. So I'll spare you from that." Ataf looked like he was turning paler, a feat considering how dark-skinned the Redguard boy was.

"I managed to escape that hellhole," I continued, "but not without my share of scars. I managed to find decent people to take me in. They fed me, taught me, took away my nightmares. I got a family." I licked my lips; they had suddenly become dry, and my throat was tight. "My… adopted mother… has a dangerous life. She has enemies, and they would want to hurt her through her family. That's why I never talk about my family, Ataf. It's dangerous."

"Dangerous for who?" he asked.

"For them and for me," I told him. "If anyone knew who my mother was… Well, even the good ones would treat me differently. I don't want that, and she doesn't want to risk me getting hurt again. And I've been hurt by some of the bad ones."

"Who's your mother, Aventus?" Ataf asked in a low voice, whispering as though someone might overhear us.

"Her name is Diana," I said. "But most people know her as Dovahkiin—the Dragonborn."

Ataf stared at me, his eyes wide. Taking him this far into my confidence was a dangerous gambit, but if I could get him on my side with a potentially damaging truth—limited as it might be—then he might prove a valuable ally. Dagny had said that the best way to get someone on your side was a show of empty honesty.

"Okay, but seriously," he finally said. "Who's your mom?"

The Emperor's Day ball was my real trial by fire. It was the first time that Dagny had deigned to be seen in public with me since taking me under her wing. Approaching the Blue Palace in my finest formal wear made me feel like a pretender, like I was wearing a cheap disguise and had "Beware! Poor person!" tattooed on my forehead. Horribly enough, after all of Dagny's instruction and lessons, I felt guiltier about being a street kid from Windhelm than I ever had about being a multiple murderer.

"Remember," Dagny said, tightening her grip on my arm as we walked toward the palace gates, "you're here tonight to let people get used to your face, not to get into any arguments. Be polite, speak when spoken to, and don't talk politics."

"I thought I was supposed to be learning how to talk politics?" I asked.

"Eventually, that will be all you get to talk about," she replied. "But if you start talking about politics before figuring out what the people you'll be talking with believe, you're liable to say something stupid." She paused for a moment. "Stupider than usual, I mean."

"Shouldn't I just say what I think?" She laughed, and I coughed before continuing, "Not about everything, I mean. But shouldn't I say what I really think when it comes to, like, the civil war?"

"Everyone here is against the Stormcloaks, so that's probably a safe topic," she allowed. "But without allies or a patron, you're just an interloper on their game. You don't want to go blundering around in sensitive topics until you're sure whose side you want to be on."

"I thought we were all on the side of the Empire," I complained.

"You're so sweet," Dagny replied drily. "The strength of the Empire has always been its diversity—not just in races and peoples, but in points of view. Ulfric Stormcloak wants one people for one land, with one vision for the future. The Empire lets everyone have their own way, more or less. But with that kind of freedom comes disunity. That's what my father says, anyway."

"So what you're saying is that everyone is on their own side," I said, nodding. "They just have a common enemy."

"I wouldn't call Ulfric Stormcloak 'common,'" she said with a crooked smile. "And some of our allies are still debating about whether or not he's the enemy." She paused again. "Maybe you should avoid talking about the civil war too, come to think of it."

As we walked through the doors of the Blue Palace, I was shocked to see the decorations strung up everywhere. There were paper lanterns, strung ribbon, and enough candles to turn the night into day. The people—more than had been here on my previous visit, by several dozen—were wearing clothes of fine material and cut, silks and brocades in bright colors and patterns. It was so overwhelming that without Dagny's training, I probably would have been staring at everything with my mouth wide open.

Not that I would have admitted anything of the sort to her even under torture.

Almost as soon as we were inside, I was distracted from my wide-eyed appreciation of the gala surroundings by a sudden clap on the back. I could feel someone there before it happened, but I hadn't been expecting someone to touch me. I wheeled on my assailant, only barely keeping my fists from coming up into a fighting position, to see Frothar standing there, a broad smile on his face.

"By the Eight!" he declared to his sister, "I see that you kept your word. Aventus hardly looks like the same person at all."

"That's a good thing?" I asked nervously.

"Yes, it is," Dagny quickly interjected. She pushed up against my side and gripped my arm tighter. Frothar raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything about it. "He looks like a proper gentleman now."

"I don't know about that," Frothar said slyly. He patted me on the back again. "A gentleman needs a sword." Then he paused and leaned close, his smile suddenly feral. "But I hope that he is a gentleman in all other respects. I would hate for him to need that sword. Do we understand one another?" I didn't really, but I wasn't about to disagree with Jarl Balgruuf's oldest son, so I just nodded. He smiled broadly and winked at me. "Excellent. Then I hope the two of you have a good time."

As he sauntered away, Dagny frowned and shook her head. I looked at her, but before I could ask her any questions, people began to trickle in past us, pausing to greet her. I smiled and nodded in all the right places for what felt like forever. I thought about what Frothar had said from time to time as we mingled. Did everyone in Solitude make so little sense?

I had been pulled away from the buffet table for what felt like the tenth time by Dagny's insistent hands when the bells began to toll the midnight hour. I looked up, surprised; had it really gotten so late? It seemed like few people were taking the opportunity to leave, but I could feel fatigue beginning to creep into my bones. This event had been an endurance trial. Between the lack of real food, the constant walking or dancing, and the mental strain of being nice all the time, it felt like some strange torture more than a party.

Certainly, there were fewer people smashed out of their minds drunk than I was used to at a Dark Brotherhood party.

"Has my sister driven you crazy yet?" came a voice to my left, just behind me. I nearly jumped; I could usually sense someone getting so close. I expected to see Frothar when I turned around, but it was a younger man, perhaps my age. It took me a moment to remember his name as Nelkir, Frothar and Dagny's youngest brother. He was wearing an unfashionably dark tunic, black with silver highlights. It set off his hair and eyes, but called attention to how pale he was, a sickly white that seemed unhealthier than my classmate Jorn, who was almost as pale as a snowbank.

"Your sister has been very helpful to me," I said formally, not sure how to react at his sudden arrival. More than that, it kind of creeped me out that he had been able to sneak up on me. Maybe the party and the fatigue were dulling my edge. "Without her, I don't know what I would do." I scanned around a moment; Dagny had been content to wander off from time to time, leaving me to my own devices for long stretches. It was part of her training, to see if I could manage without her.

"That's good," Nelkir said with a thin smile, taking a sip from a goblet of wine. "I was looking forward to getting to know you better, but Dagny's been monopolizing your time. I always like to know my sister's friends."

"She's lucky to have two brothers watching out for her well-being," I replied politely.

"Well, a brother and a half," he chuckled darkly. I tilted my head to indicate that I didn't understand. "I'm Dagny and Frothar's half-brother," he explained. "We're all children of Jarl Balgruuf, but I have a different mother."

"Does that matter?" I asked. All of my own siblings were adopted, so the idea of sharing parents being important was a little foreign to me.

"Only to some people," he said vaguely. He tossed back the rest of his wine and sat the goblet down on a passing servant's tray without looking. "Anyway, it was good to see you again, Aventus Aretino. I look forward to seeing more of you."

"Thank you for your kind words," I was saying even as he walked off. I furrowed my brow as he made his way back into the crowd. I was beginning to wonder if nobles just spoke a different language than the rest of us. I certainly couldn't make heads or tails of half the things they said.

"Was Nelkir bothering you?" Dagny asked as she joined back up with me.

"Bothering me?" I asked. "No, not at all. Why would he bother me?"

"You had a look," she responded. "And Nelkir… Well, he used to be a good boy. But in the last year or two, he's just been a little brat." I looked at her, letting the doubt show on my face. Considering how rude Dagny could be at times, I wasn't sure that she had the right to call anyone a brat. "It's true," she insisted. "He goes out every night, drinking and wasting Father's money. He even dropped out of school. If Father weren't so busy with the war, Nelkir wouldn't be able to act like this."

"Can't Frothar say something?" I asked.

"Please," she sneered. "Frothar's too busy being perfect."

"Why don't you introduce me around some more?" I said, trying to change the subject to something more pleasant. "I could still use the practice." She nodded and smiled tightly, apparently grateful to be doing something other than talking about her family.

We made introductions for a while, saying hello to the better class of people. I would never remember all of their names later, but it was unlikely that they would remember mine either, so I supposed that was fair. As the night wore on, people finally began to trickle out. I despaired of finding my target and dreaded the thought of having to come to another of these functions.

"I'm going to get something to eat," I declared to Dagny. She looked over at the buffet table with something like envy.

"It's been long enough that it won't be rude," she finally relented. "But don't stay long. That boor Erikur is over there."

"Erikur?" I asked, almost shocked. I looked at the buffet table, seeing a portly Nord man shoveling food onto a plate. His fine clothes indicated that he held a good position in the court, but there was something sleazy about him. He picked up food with his fingers then wiped them on the tablecloth; his eyes roamed the backsides of serving girls. I suddenly realized that I had seen this man several times tonight already, but Dagny had never introduced us. "Is he someone important?" I finally asked.

"Unfortunately," Dagny replied. "He's a merchant who was made a thane for his contributions to the stability of the court. His sister isn't too bad, but he's unbearably venal." She shook her head and clucked her tongue. "I've been trying to keep you away from him all night, so don't linger too long."

She had been keeping me away from the one person I was looking for all night? Of course she had.

Dagny sauntered away, and I straightened my tunic as I made my way over to the buffet table. I picked up a canapé and popped it into my mouth, figuring that I would need at least a little strength before beginning my introductions.

"Thane Erikur," I said formally, finally within striking range of my target after so many weeks of struggle and effort, "it's a pleasure to meet you."

"Actually," said the portly middle-aged Nord, "I'm already somewhat familiar with you, young man." It was an effort to keep the smile on my face

"You have the advantage of me, sir," I replied, Dagny's words falling from my lips. If it were up to me, he wouldn't for very long.

"How could I not know the Dragonborn's son?" he smiled, clapping me on the shoulder. My blood ran cold; how many people knew the truth about me? "No worries, boy," he laughed. "I know the court doesn't want it going outside. My discretion is assured. Besides, if I told anyone, your mother would skin me alive." We laughed together at what he didn't realize wasn't a joke. Hecate really would skin him alive if she found out that he had gone against her.

"You must be very well trusted to know that much," I said, feeling my chances of recovering Finn's Lute diminishing with each passing moment.

"Just between us," he said, leaning in close, "Jarl Elisif couldn't run this city without my help." I groaned inside, keeping my smile plastered in place as hard as I could.

Anyone with those kinds of connections would have amazing security, which meant it would be nearly impossible to get in and out without either being seen or killing someone. I was a master of stealth, but I was trained to kill guards that might see me and hide their bodies. Sneaking into and out of places, leaving everyone alive, was more difficult for me.

"I hear that you're in the Bards College," Erikur said, not really asking a question. I nodded and smiled. "Well, I'm something of a collector of bardic memorabilia."

"Really?" I asked, genuinely interested for the first time that night.

"Oh, yes," he chuckled, apparently happy to brag about his cultured hobbies. "I don't normally let outsiders see my collection, but given that your mother is an old friend, I could make an exception." I paused, thinking about it. Dagny had said that I could use my relationship with Diana—with the Dragonborn—as leverage, but I hadn't really considered it until just now.

"That would be delightful," I smiled. "Should I call upon you at your home?"

"Well, I'll be leaving Solitude soon on business," he demurred. I smiled inwardly. "After New Life Day, I should be free for a tour, though. As a personal favor."

"I thank you for your kindness, my thane," I said formally. His broad, smarmy smile only made me happier to steal from him.

It was easy enough for figure out when Erikur was leaving the city. Now that I knew who to watch out for, following him was simple. The man couldn't go anywhere without a contingent of guards and a pile of portable luxuries. Since it was late autumn in Skyrim, the only practical way he would be leaving Solitude on business would be by ship. My experiences as a dock worker let me disguise myself long enough to figure out which ship he would be leaving on, and then it was just a matter of killing time until his home was empty.

The week couldn't pass fast enough. I went to classes, had lunch with my classmates, kept up appearances by spending time with Dagny, and trained. Nelkir being able to sneak up on me had been an unpleasant surprise, so I redoubled my efforts in my morning routines to try and get back my edge. I was afraid that all the fine food and warm beds had started to make me soft, if a little lordling like Dagny's brother could get the jump on me.

Ataf seemed happier to be around me too. He didn't bring up my secret, but every now and then he would look at me while our classmates were talking and give me a little, knowing nod.

It hadn't been too hard to track down Erikur's home. It was in the same district as Proudspire Manor, so it would be easy to use Proudspire as a base for my infiltration. When the school week ended, I said my goodbyes to Ataf, packed my things and made my way over. My first stop was to bring a treat to Pavot and take him onto the back patio for a game of catch. I made a mental note to take him for a decent run outside the city walls after I was done recovering the lute.

While I was throwing things for Pavot to bring back to me, I heard the approach of slippered feet on stone. I paused in our game and turned to see Dagny walking onto the patio, a heavy fur stole around her shoulders to ward off the cold.

"I don't see how you can survive in this weather in just a tunic and trousers," she grumbled. "Shouldn't you be wearing a coat at least?"

"Playing with Pavot keeps me warm," I laughed. I threw the stick again, then braced myself when the ice wolf brought it back and almost crashed into me in his enthusiasm.

"If I didn't know better," Dagny said, "I would swear that your dog was an ice wolf."

"He might have some ice wolf blood in him," I allowed. "He's kind of a mutt." Pavot looked up at me with hurt eyes, as though he could understand what I was saying. I laughed and rubbed him behind the ears until his tongue lolled out happily.

Dagny walked over and tentatively reached out toward him. I was prepared to pull her away if I had to. Pavot didn't like very many people. He didn't bite except on command, but he could seem quite scary when he wanted to be. Fortunately, he seemed to like Dagny; at the least, he tolerated her petting him. As she rubbed the top of the ice wolf's head, she turned to look at me and smiled. Her fingers slowly circled mine, until she was rubbing the back of my hand instead of Pavot's head.

I looked down at her, wondering what she was doing, when she closed her eyes and tilted her head up toward me. I stared at her in confusion until she opened her eyes again. Her lips curled into a pout and she put her hands on her hips.

"You really don't know anything useful, do you?" she complained. Before I could respond, she leaned up and pressed her lips against mine. I gasped in shock, parting my teeth enough for her tongue to briefly test mine before withdrawing. Before I knew what I was doing, I leaned down into her kiss, closing my eyes and just enjoying the moment. Finally, after a long time, we both drew back to take a breath.

"What was that for?" I asked.

"I felt like it," Dagny said with a flutter of her hair. "Don't think that it means I like you or anything. I just felt sorry for you, that's all."

"Sure thing, princess," I said with a smile. "Whatever you say."

Before I could lean in to kiss Dagny again, I happened to look behind her. Past the low wall of Proudspire Manor's patio, across the small gap, on the patio of Dagny's house, I could see Nelkir standing there. I had no idea how long he had been there, watching us, but his face was dark and his eyes hateful.

If I didn't know better, I would swear that he was thinking about killing me.

…to be continued…


	6. Heist Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus finally enacts his plan to steal back Finn's Lute for the Bards College, but things go awry when it turns out that he's not the only one interested in the lute.

Chapter 6: Heist Games

 

I broke my kiss with Dagny so suddenly that she gasped. She looked up at me, worried.

"Aventus," she said in a hurt voice. "What's wrong? Did I…"

"It's Nelkir," I said, looking past the top of her head. I looked down at her, seeing the confusion on her face. "He's watching us," I explained. Pavot growled low in his throat, but I put a light hand on the ice wolf's muzzle to make him be quiet. Chastised, my companion backed away a few paces and laid down on the stone, but he never took his intense blue eyes off the Nord boy.

"That little creep," she huffed, her pale face turning bright red in frustration. Dagny turned on her heel and began to stomp her way toward the edge of the veranda. When I looked back up to where Nelkir stood, his face was more relaxed—almost amused. I blinked rapidly, trying hard to retain the image of his furious expression.

"About time," the boy drawled as his sister stalked up to the railing. The two of them were almost ten feet apart, across the small gap between Proudspire Manor and the rear porch of Jarl Balgruuf's home. "I swear, big sister, I was beginning to think that you might be destined to become an old maid."

"I'm fifteen, you ass!" she hissed at him, her hands clenched white on the railing. I had a feeling that if Nelkir were any closer, those delicate hands might be wrapped around his neck.

"Women aren't like wine," he laughed, pulling a metal flask out of his pocket and taking a long drink. "Let them go too long, and they spoil." He laughed again, a slightly uneven noise that made me shiver. "Of course, we don't have to worry about you getting any more spoiled than you are already. Isn't that right, Princess Sweetroll?"

"I told you not to call me that!" she yelled, and began to clamber up onto the railing. If I hadn't caught up to her and grabbed her shoulder, I really think she would have tried to make the jump, bustle and all.

"Cheers!" Nelkir shouted when he saw me restraining his sister. He nodded and took another liberal swig from his flask. "Good to see you again, Aventus."

"Really?" I asked, trying to hold onto both the chubby girl in my arms and my dignity. I was succeeding at the former, but mostly failing at the latter. "From where I was standing, it looked like you weren't too happy."

"Just a little surprised," he replied, tucking away the flask with a hurt look on his face. He seemed so sincere that I couldn't help but question what I had seen before. "And I was a little upset to see my sister smooching on some idiot—until I realized it was you, of course." I nodded slowly. That sounded reasonable—and it was more likely than Nelkir harboring some murderous grudge that he was suddenly able to hide completely.

"Who else would it be?" Dagny huffed, finally relaxing in my grip a bit. "We're on the porch of Aventus' house!"

"You could have just come over here to be out of Frothar's sight," Nelkir responded. "Not really necessary, by the way, since he's out for the day." He paused, a slightly addled look on his face "No, I suppose I really didn't think that one through very well. Suffice to say, the fault is all mine." He gave a mocking half-bow with a devilish smile and Dagny sighed in frustration before going slack in my arms.

"You little idiot," she said, shaking her head. She shook me off her arm and leaned on the railing, clearly still annoyed but no longer frothing mad. "So, are you going to tell Frothar about this? Or Father?"

"Of course not," he replied at once. Dagny seemed taken aback. "Why should I have all the fun in this family? I'm thrilled that you finally have a boyfriend."

"He's not my-" she started, only to have Nelkir cut her off with an impatient wave of his hand.

"So you were just sucking face for your health?" Dagny and I both turned red this time, and Nelkir laughed long and hard. "Please forgive me, sister. But if you could see your expression right now, you'd laugh too."

"I somehow doubt she would," I muttered, drawing another burst of laughter from Nelkir and a sharp look from Dagny. I rolled my shoulders and wondered if every noble was required to take a big dose of crazy on a daily basis, or if it was just Balgruuf's children.

"I was just stepping out for a sip of courage before dinner," Nelkir said, wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes. "I take it you're still joining us?"

"Is Father coming home for dinner?" Dagny asked, seeming cheered by the prospect.

"Sadly, no," Nelkir informed her. Her shoulders slumped and she frowned. "Irileth tells me that he is in deep counsel with the jarl and her advisers. I wonder if said counsel will involve mead and dancing girls. I might be more interested in politics if that were the case." Seeing Dagny's face become stormy again, he chuckled and shrugged. "I'm just saying that I don't know what sort of planning can be done with General Tullius out of the city and winter coming. No one can move troops in the winter time."

"No one but Ulfric Stormcloak," Dagny hissed. "Or have you forgotten the night he took our home from us?"

"I've forgotten nothing," Nelkir said in a low, dangerous voice. His face dropped all pretense of courtesy and pleasantness, becoming dark and pained. "I will never forget the night the Stormcloaks came to Whiterun—or the things that happened then." Nelkir turned on his heel and stormed off.

I could see the family resemblance. How many times had Dagny done that same dramatic exit when she was done explaining herself?

"What happened to him?" I asked softly once he was gone.

"Nothing happened to Nelkir," Dagny said, not looking at me. "Nothing more than happened to the rest of us. We all lost important things that night—and important people."

"I thought the Stormcloaks preferred to take members of the court alive," I replied.

"Preference doesn't always mean getting what you want," she said softly. "Our court wizard was killed, and a lot of our house guard."

"Your court wizard?" I asked. "Farengar, right?" She nodded, still not looking at me. "My mother spoke kindly of him." Dagny laughed bitterly.

"They argued all the time, as far as I know," she said, shaking her head. "But he and Nelkir were close. I think that Nelkir might have been interested in becoming a mage himself, before the Stormcloaks attacked Whiterun. He was always a little jerk, but after we fled the city he became downright vicious." She sniffed and ran a hand discretely across her cheek; I hadn't realized she was crying.

"Maybe he just misses his friend," I offered.

"We all miss Farengar," she said in a thick voice. "We all miss home."

And then the floodgates opened and Dagny began to weep openly. She turned to me and buried her face in my chest, sobs wracking her body. I wrapped my arms around her and kissed the top of her head, as I had seen Cicero do for Hecate on more than one occasion. It had seemed to help Hecate, and I didn't know what else to do.

In my heart, I cursed Nelkir for turning what had been a very pleasant evening into something ugly. I knew it wasn't his fault—he was probably just as hurt as Dagny was—but it didn't stop me from being angry.

It was well after sunset by the time Dagny left for home. All at once, her crying had stopped, she composed herself, thanked me, and left without another word. I stood there in the gathering dark for long moments, trying to understand what had passed between us—wondering if Nelkir had somehow spoiled it, wondering how I actually felt about her. Pavot senses my disquiet and nuzzled up against my leg, finally breaking me from my reverie.

I shrugged it off as best I could and went inside Proudspire Manor. The place was lit up so I gathered that Jordis, Diana's housecarl, was in attendance. I really had no idea what the woman did when either I or my adopted mother weren't in residence, but she had always been at the mansion whenever I stopped by. As I stepped inside and rubbed my arms to get warm, I could smell something wafting out of the kitchen.

I suddenly realized how hungry I was. It had been my intention to just grab something from the pantry and head out; between being cold and confused, I decided that it would be worth my time to see if Jordis minded me using the kitchen once she was done. As I walked in, I saw her crouching next to the fire, keeping the coals under it banked. When she saw me, she stirred them with a metal poker to bring them back to life, bringing more heat under a large covered cook-pot.

"I didn't know how long you'd be," she said, "so I kept dinner warm while you were busy."

"Jordis…" I started. "Have you been in here this whole time?"

"Well, I didn't want to eavesdrop or anything," she said with a slight blush, looking back at the fire. "You're here so rarely, I thought it was the least I could do to make dinner."

"That's… Thank you," I finally managed to get out. It touched me that someone I barely knew would be so nice to me. Thinking back on it, I realized how often I had been the recipient of kindness from strangers; in a very real sense, I wouldn't be alive if it weren't for such acts.

When you're an assassin, it's easy to forget that there are good people out there too. You start thinking about the world in terms of clients, targets, and killers. But there are other kinds of people—decent people. It was good to have a reminder of it from time to time. I had planned on just stopping in and grabbing some food before rushing off to steal from Erikur, but the sincere, almost pathetic look on Jordis' face convinced me to stay a while.

"What are we having for dinner?" I asked.

"We?" she responded, seeming confused. "I figured that I would just get whatever you left behind…" She paused and looked up at me with sad eyes. "I'm used to getting other people's leftovers. It's not so bad. Once you get used to it." I paused, taken aback by the old pain I saw in her face. Finally, I made a decision. Maybe it was time to start giving back some of the kindness that people had been showing me for years.

"Jordis, do you serve my mother?" I demanded.

"Of course, Aventus," she said in a slightly hurt voice.

"So you serve me too, right?"

"With my life, if need be," she responded.

"Then I order you to have dinner with me," I continued. Her face slowly lit up like a warm spring morning. She might not be as stunningly beautiful as her cousin, Elisif the Fair, but she was far from ugly. "If I'm going to be here at Proudspire Manor, I can't feel like the place is empty. And… I'd very much like us to be friends."

"Friends?" Jordis said in a small voice. "I've never had very many friends before."

"Neither have I," I told her. "So it's a new experience for us both." I held out my hand to her in the Imperial style, offering a friendship that I would never have thought to give only a few months before. Maybe Ataf was rubbing off on me after all.

I was only a little surprised when she ignored my hand and wrapped me in a full-on hug, crushing my arms to my side in her powerful embrace. I guess being a sword-maiden gave you good upper-body strength. The hug seemed to last forever, with Jordis babbling into my ear about how grateful she was and how she wouldn't let me down and how she'd be the best friend ever.

"Jordis…" I finally managed to choke out.

"What is it, Aventus?" she asked.

"You're choking me."

"Oh!" she exclaimed as she released me from her bear—like grip. "I'm so sorry!"

"No problem," I told her with a smile, worried that she might get upset enough to bolt away. "Now, what do we have to eat? I'm starving."

She smiled at me and turned back to the fire, eager to show me what she had laid out. I smiled to myself a little too; I might not get to hit Erikur's house tonight, but the lute would still be there tomorrow.

"What do you mean, she doesn't want to see me?" I said with far more hurt in my voice than I'd intended to let out.

"Just what I said," Irileth replied, shutting the door behind her and crossing her arms. The message was clear: I wasn't welcome in Jarl Balgruuf's home right now. "Dagny said she doesn't want any visitors, and she didn't make an exception for you."

"I just don't understand," I sighed. The morning sun was doing nothing to drive away the cold, but the weather was less frigid than the reception I was getting from Balgruuf's housecarl. "Have I done something wrong?"

"It's not my place to say," the Dunmer woman said in a voice that dripped with venom. Clearly I had done something to offend Dagny; I just didn't know what it was.

"All right then," I finally said. "If you get a chance, please let her know that I stopped by. And give her my thanks for all the help." I started to turn away, then paused because of the slightly incredulous look on Irileth's face. "What?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said. "Just surprised that you're not throwing a tantrum. Young men thwarted by a girl often do."

"It's her life," I said with as much dignity as I could muster. "If she doesn't want to see me, she doesn't want to see me."

"Do you really want to see her?" Irileth asked, with what sounded like genuine curiosity.

"I wouldn't have come here if I didn't," I replied.

"That's not what I asked," the housecarl returned. "Do you, Aventus Aretino, want to see Dagny? Or does the son of the Dragonborn want to see the daughter of Jarl Balgruuf?"

"Why does everyone bring it back to politics?" I asked, unable to hide my resentment. Irileth seemed taken aback by the rancor in my voice. "I don't know what I did to piss Dagny off, but let her know I'm sorry about it, okay? Wish her the best from me."

"Hold on," Irileth said before I could leave. I sighed in frustration and crossed my arms to mimic her stance. She leaned in to speak more quietly to me. "Dagny isn't angry at you. She's just not feeling well today."

"Why didn't you just say that then?" I demanded.

"I wanted to see what kind of person she was getting involved with," she responded. "I've seen young lordlings throw a fit in public if they can't see their lady friend right away, and it embarrasses everyone. Still, it's better than a young lady winding up with boy who would shame her more in the long run. You seem to actually care about Dagny, and not just her position. That's… refreshing."

"She's done a lot for me," I said, cooling down a bit. "And thinking about position isn't something I'm used to."

"I suppose not," Irileth allowed. "Come back tomorrow, and hopefully she'll be feeling well enough to see you."

"Thank you," I said with a small bow.

"Gods know you still need her," Irileth chuckle. "That bow was terrible." My face flushed as I straightened up, which only made Irileth laugh more. I shook my head and started to walk away, and Irileth let herself back into the house.

Before I had gone more than a few steps, I heard a tapping noise coming from above me. I looked up toward the source of the sound and saw Dagny at a window on the second floor. She looked pale and drawn, but she was smiling wanly. She pressed one hand up against the glass pane and made a small wave. I smiled back and held up my hand. Her mouth moved; only because of my training with lip reading could I make out "Sorry."

"It's okay," I mouthed back. "Tomorrow?"

She nodded, her face brightening up slightly before she winced and put a hand to her stomach. She waved goodbye and moved away from the window.

I shook my head as I began to walk across the district. Nobles and their housecarls and their damnable games. Irileth seemed more straightforward than most people I had met through the court—Dunmer tended to be pretty vocal about their opinions, in my experience—but even she couldn't resist testing me. I didn't like playing games. I wish she could have just said "Dagny's on her period. Come back later." That, I could have dealt with.

It's not like I hadn't lived around women before. Even back when I was living with my mother in Windhelm, I had realized she wouldn't work for two or three days each month because she was "feeling poorly"; she didn't tell me about it specifically, but the regularity of it wasn't something that you could miss. The female humans and mer in the Brotherhood had made something of a joke about it with the beast-kin, since Argonians and Khajiit didn't suffer the same cycle. Now that I thought about it, I had a lot more sisters than brothers in my adopted family.

Hecate was worse than most, actually. She only seemed to get her period every three or four months, but it was like battening down for a storm whenever it happened. She spent a lot of time sequestered, and everyone else got out of Sanctuary as much as possible because of how miserable she became to be around. Cicero even installed a warning bell to let everyone know they should find a rock to hide under; he called it "the doom bell." A little dramatic, I thought, but the Fool of Hearts was given to grand gestures.

Truthfully, I was surprised at how upset I was at not being able to see Dagny. She had been a royal pain in my side for weeks, even as she prepared me for the harsh realities of courtly life. I knew that I liked her as a friend, but her kissing me had come out of left field. I hadn't disliked kissing Dagny… Actually, it had been very pleasant. Still, I knew that people outside the Dark Brotherhood had different ideas about what that sort of activity implied. Stuff about long-term relationships and courting and things I didn't really understand all that well.

Could I have a relationship with someone outside the Brotherhood? Did I even want to? It was all so confusing.

Still, not seeing Dagny gave me a little more time to scope out Erikur's house during the day. I had been by the place before, of course, but it never hurt to give your target one last look before committing to a mission. Especially since I was acting outside of my core training—that training being "kill everyone in my way." No, this task called for more stealth and less murder than I was used to.

Erikur's stately home was only a few blocks away from Proudspire Manor, in the same district of Solitude. This part of the city catered to the wealthy and the high-born. Erikur's home might have been newer than many of the buildings in the district, but it was no less well-appointed. A narrow three-story manor near the district wall, Erikur's house was clearly built on a plot of land purchased between older, more venerable homes. Its walls and gables were fine stone and clean slate, and it even had a small veranda on the side. It was a short walk from both Castle Dour and the Blue Palace, the twin beating hearts of the city's political life. Perfect for a social climber like Erikur.

As I walked down the street, I glanced at the veranda; that would be my point of entry. There was a terraced outcropping off to one side of the house from a higher level of the city. From that, I could toss a line across to the veranda and make an approach from a part of the house out of the eye of any random guard patrol. If I was especially lucky, it wouldn't be locked. Since I didn't believe in relying on luck, I would be bringing along a crowbar to force the lock.

Scanning across the house, I happened to notice a young woman on the opposite end of the street. She was brown-haired and tall, probably a Nord, wearing the garb of a serving maid. She was looking at the house too; her pensive expression indicated that she might be considering looking for work there. I didn't envy her the task. Erikur seemed like he would be as much of a boor to work with as he was to deal with in court. Any house maid of his was probably signing up for a working experience full of random groping and drunken leers. I considered warning her off before deciding that it was really none of my business.

Something about her struck me as unusual, though. It finally hit me that a serving maid normally didn't wear finely-crafted leather boots with her tattered, patchwork dress. I started walking toward her, not really sure what I would do when I caught up to her, when she noticed me and abruptly turned away. She began walking directly away from me at a brisk pace, which only heightened my interest. People with nothing to hide didn't run from random strangers.

I picked up my pace and she picked hers up too, making a sudden turn into the alleys just off the upper district. I paused for a moment before following. It could well be an ambush. Finally, I decided that anyone stupid enough to try and jump me for my coin purse probably deserved whatever happened to them, and I followed.

I managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of her scarf as she turned the corner ahead of me, and I sped up into a jog, For a moment, it seemed like I would catch up to her. But as I turned the next corner, I found myself in a dead-end alleyway, with only rats and pigeons for company. I slowly turned around, scanning up and down the alley for any sign of her. I braced for any possible attack that might come.

Nothing.

Somehow, she had lost me. I wondered who she might have been, and where she could have gotten the skill to lose a trained assassin who was trailing her. More than that, though, something about her had been familiar. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I was certain that I had seen her somewhere before. I searched around for a few minutes, seeking some sign of her, before I finally gave it up and decided to head home for lunch. I had things to do today, after all. Little mysteries like this one could wait.

As I left the alley, I was sure that I felt eyes on my back, but I didn't bother looking again. If she had evaded all of my efforts to find her, I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of me being spooked by it.

It was time.

Cold winter night had fallen across Solitude, and the streets were empty enough to give the city cause for its name. Even the guards were patrolling thinly, preferring to huddle around coal-filled braziers to keep their gloved hands from going numb. I had taken the opportunity to switch into my Dark Brotherhood leathers, something I got to do only rarely these days, but had taken the practical addition of a woolen cloak and muffler. As I'd been forced to repeatedly remind my friends at the Bards College, I wasn't a Nord, so I had to take more precautions against the cold.

As I closed in on Erikur's house, I circled the area through neighboring alleyways to get a good look at the place before breaking in. None of the lights were on inside, so the couple of guards Erikur had left in the house were probably sleeping. As long as I didn't get too noisy, no one would have cause to even leave their beds. The moons were hidden behind clouds, and a light snow was falling from the sky. Fortunately, I wouldn't have to worry about leaving any tracks that anyone could follow, since I wouldn't be making my approach from the street.

I walked around the far side of the block to break line of sight with anyone that I might not have noticed, then paced back around to my elevated position that overlooked Erikur's side porch. A quick toss of my grappling hook and line secured it in place, then I tied it off on my end and shimmied across, hanging from the rope by my hands and ankles.

Once I reached the porch, I dropped silently to the ground and looked over the edge. Unless someone walked right through this side alley and looked directly up at the right angle, my line would be invisible—which was good, since I didn't want to risk leaving through the front door, and a two-story drop off the side of the house would probably wind up with me twisting an ankle if I was lucky.

I pulled my crowbar out of the slim pack strapped to my back and made ready to pop the door off its catch. Before I did, I checked it just to be safe—and found it unlocked. I smiled under my muffler at my turn of good fortune. No sense looking a gift horse in the mouth. I stowed the crowbar back in the pack, secured it, and slipped in through the door as quick as I could while keeping quiet.

Now I was at the point where I was operating off of guesswork and observation. An inquiry with one of the maids a few weeks before had gotten me a vague sketch of the interior layout, including a locked room which she believed was Erikur's study. Even the cleaning staff weren't allowed in, which made me strongly believe it was where Erikur kept his most valuable possessions—hopefully including Finn's Lute. If I had to search the place top to bottom, I would do it, though it wasn't my first choice. I didn't like to think about what I would do if it wasn't here, but I would bet good septims that Erikur was exactly the sort of arrogant bastard who would keep his illicit gains within easy access for gloating.

I moved through the house as quietly as my training allowed, blending with the shadows and ducking below windows to avoid even the chance of notice by any passerby. The house was silent save for the groaning of the wind outside and the occasional creak of the foundation settling. From my quick glances outside, it seemed like the moons were occasionally breaking through the clouds, filling the city with a gentle silver glow. I crept up to the second floor, to the door that was always locked.

It was standing open, just an inch.

I froze in front of the door. Generally, when your luck seemed too good to be true, it was. I pulled out my collapsible mace and kept my thumb on the catch that would release it to its full length. The heavy ebony gave me some reassurance in case of trouble. I slowly pushed the door open, peeking through to see if anyone was waiting for me. Once the entrance was wide enough to put my body through, I snaked inside and pushed the door back to its almost-closed state.

There was no one inside.

A quick scan of the room confirmed my initial glance. The place was empty, save for a desk covered in neatly-stacked papers and several shelves and display cases. The shelves were covered in valuable-looking trinkets, most of them quite gaudy as befit a man of Erikur's venal tastes. In the middle of the room, in a place of honor, was a tall glass case with a gold stand, on which sat Finn's Lute. I smiled under my muffler, pacing toward the case.

I paused a moment, thinking about the culmination of my weeks of effort to find this historical treasure. It was a piece of interesting memorabilia to me, though I didn't feel the same sentimentality about objects that some people did. Somewhere along the line, though, I had become obsessed with Finn's Lute. At first, I thought that returning it could get me some amount of freedom from the gilded cage I was living in at the Bards College. Then it had become a reason in and of itself, a hobby to keep me occupied and distracted from dealing with the reality of my new life.

As I looked at the ancient musical instrument, I realized that now I could let go of all of that. Maybe now, after I returned the lute to its proper place in the collection of the Bards College, I could actually start moving forward with my life. I could try to figure out what my relationship with Dagny was turning into—if I really cared about her, or if she was just a friend. I could think about having real friends who weren't hired killers, about my studies…

For the first time since I had come to the Bards College, I felt truly free again. The moons broke through the clouds outside, spilling light into the window on the far side of the room. As the light passed through the glass case, it turned the glass reflective. I could see myself clearly in the mirror-like surface.

And I could see someone creeping up behind me.

I spun, flicking out the mace to its full length and taking a broad swipe at the approaching figure. My opponent rolled backward out of the reach of my attack, then darted back in to deliver a series of quick rabbit punches to my stomach. The reinforced leather armor kept the worst of it from me, but it still staggered me a step and slowed me down. I was barely able to block my foe's uppercut toward my jaw with crossed wrists, but then her hands closed over the top of mine and she head-butted me hard enough to make me see stars and drop my mace.

I suddenly realized that I was thinking of my opponent as a woman. As I shook my head to clear it, I saw that my assessment was correct. She was nearly as tall as me, broad-shouldered like a Nord woman, wearing dark brown leather armor with a hood that hid her hair and eyes from me. The lower part of her jaw was distinctly feminine, though, and the body that was under the armor spoke of both curves and muscles. The armor didn't look like that of a normal city guard; maybe she was a mercenary that Erikur had hired to protect his house while he was gone.

She didn't slow her assault as I assessed her, pressing forward with a series of forward jabs and snap kicks. I parried everything I could, but her hand to hand skills were at least as good as mine, and the element of surprise had put me off my game. I was also better with weapons than bare-knuckle brawling; losing my mace tilted the fight out of my favor. Not to mention that I was a lot more used to killing people who weren't aware of me, and I was months out of practice with fighting real opponents. I cursed losing my sparring partners more than ever. If I survived the night, I would have to find someone I could train with.

I realized I was making excuses while I was getting my ass kicked, and I quickly focused my mind on the fight.

I let a couple of jabs through to my armored body so that I could shoulder-check my enemy back a few feet. She stumbled, almost crashing into a glass case on the far side of the room. She dropped her guard for just a second to check her fall and avoid breaking anything. While it could have been the conscientious action of a good employee, it struck me more as the desperate maneuver of someone who was trying to avoid drawing attention. I suddenly realized that she hadn't called for help either; the two of us had been fighting in near-silence, save for our heavy breathing and the occasional thud of impact.

She was a thief, not a guard. And a pretty good thief too, to hide from me in a room this small. I had heard Hecate mention the Thieves Guild before, but she had never spoken of them with anything but contempt. To see this level of competence from one of them was shocking.

I capitalized on her moment of hesitation to put a low display stand between the two of us. Cicero had always said that nothing was a good substitute for a sharp knife and a bad attitude, but anything could be turned into a killing implement by a skilled assassin. As she darted toward me, I picked up a heavy vase and chucked it at her, forcing her to catch it to avoid making any noise. She spun and put it down, then turned toward me just in time to catch my crowbar across her stomach.

Her hair flew out around her face as she gasped heavily, all the air knocked out of her lungs. The brown strands flew in the air and her hood fell down as she tried to straighten up. As I locked eyes with her, I recognized her as the "maid" I had seen in the street earlier in the day. She must have been scoping the place out too; it certainly explained how she had managed to get away from me before. I considered asking her who she was—that sense of familiarity was haunting—but I decided that practicality had to win out. I would feel a little bad about bashing her brains in with a crowbar, but I doubted that anyone would miss a common thief.

I lifted the crowbar above my head to deal the coup de grace, but she dropped into a crouch and quickly stood up, recovering faster than I would have expected after taking a metal bar to the gut. Her outstretched hand took me in the throat and sent me reeling back. The crowbar dropped out of my numb fingers and clattered to the ground.

"What was that?" came a voice from the hallway.

The thief and I looked at each other with wide eyes, then at the door and back to each other. We had gotten so wrapped up in our fight that we hadn't heard the house guards begin their patrol. We dove in different directions, seeking cover in the small room. She snatched up my crowbar as she went past, tucking it into her belt, and I scooped up my mace, collapsing it back to concealed mode. She rolled under a display table, pulling the decorative fringe closed in front of her hiding place. I had a moment of admiration for how completely she had vanished before finding my own hiding place.

The door opened, admitting two burly guards just as I finished settling into place. They scanned the room, looking for whatever had made the noise.

"I told you it was nothing," said one of them.

"Mister Erikur never leaves this door unlocked," said the other. "And I tell you, I heard something."

"Probably just the house settling," the first one said. "Half the time, when the wind blows, it sounds like someone crying upstairs."

"Maybe the place is haunted," grumbled the second guard.

"Place is too new to be haunted," the first countered. "No one's ever died in here."

I strained to keep my arms and legs stiff, holding myself in place in the rafters a few feet above their heads, not daring to breathe lest they look up. They wandered around the room for a minute or two, chatting about whether or not a new house could be haunted, before finally giving it up and leaving, closing the door behind them. The thief and I both waited for almost another minute before we came back out of our hiding places, wary and alert in case one of us started up our fight again.

I held out my hands in a gesture of peace, hoping to resolve this before drawing the guards' attention back. If I got an easy opportunity to kill her, I would certainly take it, but my time in the Bards College had already started me thinking about how to turn enemies into opportunities with conversation.

"You're no guard," she hissed.

"Neither are you," I retorted.

"The Guild doesn't take kindly to scabs," she warned, edging toward the case with the lute in it. "When Guildmaster Frey hears about you, he'll have you hunted to the ends of Tamriel."

"And who will do the hunting?" I asked viciously. "The Dark Brotherhood?"

"That's right," she replied.

"Little difficult to get them to hunt one of their own," I told her, pulling back my cloak to show the Black Hand emblazoned on my red-and-black armor. Her brown eyes widened, and I smiled under my muffler again.

"Are you here to kill Erikur?" she asked, apparently not shocked by the idea. My estimation of how cold these thieves could be went up again. "If so, he's out of town."

"I'm not here for the thane," I told her. "I'm here for Finn's Lute."

"What does an assassin want with an antique lute?" she asked.

"None of your concern," I growled.

"I'm afraid it is," she shot back. "I'm here for the lute too. I think since my organization handles stealing, and yours kills people, you're the one out of your element here."

"Fair enough," I allowed. I paused, thinking of what she had called me earlier. "The Guild doesn't take kindly to scabs, right?" She nodded. "That's why you're here. Erikur went around you for the lute so that he wouldn't have to pay your cut. Now you're here to steal the lute back and punish him. That about right?"

"Pretty clever for an assassin," she smiled. She paced toward me, grinning. I paused, ready for an attack. "I bet you're pretty handsome under that cowl too," she purred, running a hand toward my face. I grabbed her wrist, catching her short of my muffler.

"Don't," I warned.

She pulled her wrist free and spread her hands in the air, gesturing as though it didn't matter to her. While she held my gaze, and without ever losing her wide smile, she suddenly slammed her hands onto my shoulders and brought her knee up into my crotch with bone-crushing force. I slumped to the ground, struggling very hard to not throw up into my scarf while she put a square-toed boot into my stomach. As I rolled on the ground, trying to catch my breath and get the spots out of my vision, she dashed to the case, pulled it open, and snatched the lute out by its neck. I groaned, partly from the pain and partly at the horrible offense of seeing a historical relic so mishandled.

"It's been fun, handsome," the thief whispered to me before pacing toward the door.

"No, it hasn't," I managed to choke out as I held out my arm and thumbed the catch on my mace. It sprung to its full length and she stepped on the ball at the end, slipping comically with her hands thrown into the air. She tottered backwards as the lute arced across the room. I rolled onto my back and caught the lute by its body as she crashed into a glass display case, shattering it into a million glittering fragments.

"What the hell?" came a startled shout from somewhere on the first floor.

I scrabbled up to my feet and ran for the door, pushing out into the hallway with the thief close on my heels. A quick glance back showed that her hair was full of glass and her face was twisted into an ugly grimace. We were both slower than usual from our injuries, but quick enough to make it to the side veranda before the guards came up the other side of the house.

Once we were both outside, I tossed her the lute and snatched my crowbar from her belt. She was so shocked at the switch that she didn't even have time to fight back. I turned away from her and jammed the crowbar into the door frame.

"That'll hold them for a minute if they come this way," I told her. "What was your plan to get out with the lute anyway?"

"Hole up until morning, then leave with the cleaning staff," she responded quickly. "Throw the lute in with a laundry basket and just walk out the front door."

"Clever," I allowed, turning back to her. I pulled the pack off my back that I had carried the crowbar and rope in earlier, grabbed the lute back from her, and stuffed it inside. I closed the bag's opening around the neck and tied it shut, then handed it to her. "Carry it across," I told her. "I'll be right behind you."

She didn't ask questions or look twice. She just strapped the lute onto her back and jumped up to grab the rope, swinging up to wrap her legs around it and begin shimmying across. I didn't know if it was secure enough to hold two people at once, but I knew that I didn't want to give her a chance to decide to cut the rope before I came across, so I stayed right behind her the whole way. As soon as we were on the far side and on solid ground, I jerked the rope to free the grapnel from the house and reeled it in.

To my total lack of surprise, while my back was turned I could hear the girl's boots squelching in the snow as she turned to run away again. I quickly turned, lashed out with the grappling hook, and snagged her foot just as she started to run. She fell flat on her face, sprawled out in the snow as I walked over and pulled to lute off her back.

"Bad luck," I told her, not unsympathetically.

"Isn't that the truth," she grumbled as she turned over.

As the moons broke through the clouds, I felt my heart drop. Before, she had seemed familiar and I couldn't figure out why. I now realized where I had seen the girl before, and why I didn't recognize her right away. The last time I had seen the tall, athletic woman in front of me, she had been a skinny, starving girl, as abused and dirty as I had been. The dirt and bruises on her face now made the resemblance complete enough that it finally came back to me in a rush.

"Runa?" I asked. "Runa Fair-Shield?"

"How do you know my name?" she asked, sitting up in the snow.

"I remember you from Honorhall," I told her, crouching down and laying Finn's Lute gently off to one side. "You were very kind to me once, and I promised you that I would save everyone. I promised that I would find the Dark Brotherhood and ask them to kill Grelod the Kind." I pulled down the muffler and threw back my cowl, revealing my face. "I kept my promise."

"By the gods," Runa whispered. "Aventus? Aventus Aretino?"

I smiled and nodded, feeling my eyes fill up with tears. Before the Brotherhood, before my new life, Runa had been one of the few people to show an interest in whether I had lived or died. She was one of the reasons I had run away from Honorhall Orphanage in the first place, to save her and the other children there. She reached up for me, and I embraced her like a long-lost sister. Both of us crouched there in the snow, holding one another for a long time.

As I pulled back to ask her what she had been doing for all these years, she surprised me by leaning back and pressing her lips against mine. Unlike Dagny's hesitant, tentative kiss, Runa's mouth parted mine with a violence I had never known before, kissing me hungrily and with a passion I hadn't expected.

"What was that for?" I asked when she finally pulled away.

"So that it wouldn't feel so bad when I did this," she whispered, just before head-butting me again.

After the stars cleared from my vision, I looked around to see Runa and the lute were both gone. A clear trail was left in the snow, and I cursed myself for a fool. I jumped to my feet and took off into the cold Solitude night, with Runa just ahead of me, laughing as she ran.

When I caught up to her, I didn't know if I was going to kiss her or kill her, but we were definitely going to be having a long talk.

…to be continued…


	7. Thieves, Killers, and Other Upstanding Citizens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus catches up to Runa, but all isn't as it seems with the young thief. Can an assassin have friends and loved ones like a normal person?

Chapter 7: Thieves, Killers, and Other Upstanding Citizens

 

"How can you defend him?" I asked, real anger creeping up into my voice. "Ulfric Stormcloak is a murderer and a tyrant!"

"That's certainly one way to think of it," Professor Gemane mused, seeming to take no offense from my angry tone. "But that's the point of the exercise: thinking about the ways in which different people view different things."

I struggled to calm down as the teacher spoke. Honestly, it wasn't really Ulfric Stormcloak that I was mad at; the last few days had just been stressful, and they didn't look like they were going to get easier any time soon.

"So then we're just supposed to ignore the things he's done?" I asked, moderating my tone.

"You have to keep in mind," Professor Gemane said as he leaned against the edge of his desk, "that to some people, Ulfric Stormcloak is a hero. To others, he's the worst sort of villain. As a bard, you have to be able to judge a room instantly to figure out what the audience believes."

"Well, that's easy enough," Jorn said with a wave of his pale hand. "Just look at what colors the guards are wearing—Stormcloak blue or Imperial red, and you've got your answer."

"Is it really?" Gemane asked with a raised eyebrow. "You think that every tavern in Stormcloak territory drinks to the Bear of Eastmarch? Or that all of the ones in Imperial Skyrim hold up a glass for the health of Jarl Elisif?" He shook his head. "In a civil war, these things become complicated. Civil wars—if I may be allowed the small pun—are rarely civil."

"And that's why you wanted us to read up about 'The Age of Oppression'?" asked Aia with a smile. "It's a brilliant way to illustrate your lesson, sir." I groaned at the obvious flattery, but Gemane preened. Aia was always looking for a way to gain an advantage in the class; the professor was knowledgeable about his subjects, but he was a little too susceptible to having his ego stroked.

"Well, about 'The Age of Oppression' and 'The Age of Aggression,'" replied Professor Gemane. "No one knows which side wrote the tune—or if it was just adopted by some bard from an older song that's been lost—but both sides now use the same musical arrangement with different lyrics to support their chosen beliefs. It helps illustrate the essential point of this lecture."

"Which is what exactly?" I asked with a sharp note. This time, Professor Gemane did seem annoyed, looking at me down his sharp nose with a glare that could cut leather.

"That the two sides are more alike than they would like to admit," he said. "Being a bard means seeing a problem from many points of view, not just your own. I think this assignment will be most illuminating for you in particular, Master Aretino."

I ran through the dark streets of Solitude, following a girl who had very recently inflicted grievous harm on me. My face hurt from the cold wind whipping into it, and my head ached from being head-butted twice in one night. My stomach roiled and my muscles burned from exertion. She laughed as she ran, moving as lightly over snow and ice as a hart through the forest, carrying Finn's Lute over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes instead of one of the most valuable historical relics in the whole country.

I was furious. I was hurting.

I was having the time of my life.

At some point, I just stopped caring why I was chasing her. Finn's Lute didn't matter. I didn't know if we were going to start fighting again when I caught up to her. Nothing mattered but the chase, the freedom of running and of hunting. I smiled in the cold and dark, feeling for the first time the true joy in just cutting loose and giving it my all. I reveled in being just an animal on the prowl, chasing down my prey as my heart pumped like a war drum in my chest.

I whistled through my teeth, and Pavot appeared out of the night, running at my side. The ice wolf was never far from me, and I had made sure he was near Thane Erikur's house before beginning my break-in. I hadn't expected anything to go wrong, but it comforted me to know that a two-hundred-pound wolf was my backup. I glanced down at the ice wolf; his doggy grin made it clear that he was enjoying the chase just as much as I was. The time had come to end it, though, before she tired of being chased and decided to disappear again.

I gestured forward, pointing at the girl's back, and forked my fingers. Pavot chuffed once and then raced off down a side alley. We had drilled this maneuver a dozen times, but it was our first time using it in the field. I was occasionally struck by just how smart Babette's ice wolf was—and sometimes wondered if he wasn't smarter than I gave him credit for. As Pavot vanished into the darkness, I put on a burst of speed and started closing the gap between us.

Runa looked back over her shoulder at the sound of my hammering footsteps drawing near, cocking a devilish grin as she started pushing herself faster. I nodded to myself; I had expected her to be pacing herself. As we passed by a bin full of garbage, I stuck out my hand and scooped up a frozen piece of trash, then chucked it at Runa's elbow. The frozen ball cracked into the wall just beside her, making her slow down slightly and spin into a defensive posture.

Just as she looked toward the noise, Pavot came barreling out of an alleyway ahead of her. The ice wolf was faster than both of us on our best day, and he crashed into her with the force of a runaway wagon. She only had time to gasp before Pavot put her on the ground, the lute spilling out of her hand and into a snowbank. I gritted my teeth at the sight, but I would have to worry about it later. For now, it was wrapped in oilcloth and unlikely to be anything more than slightly scuffed.

In the seconds it took me to catch up to them, Pavot had wrestled Runa onto her back, where she still thrashed, one hand groping for a belt knife. I calmly stepped on her wrist before bending down to disarm her, tossing the knife aside into the alley's muck.

"I'd relax if I were you," I told her. "Pavot here can get a little jumpy when his prey struggles." The ice wolf growled low in his throat and bared his teeth to back up my words, leaving me to wonder again just how much he understood of what I said.

"Okay, okay," Runa said, seeming more amused than worried. "I guess you win."

"You think this is a game?" I asked in frustration as I went to collect the lute and make certain that it wasn't damaged.

"Of course it's a game," she grinned. "You just take things too seriously." She paused, biting her lip in a way that would have been more distracting if I weren't still furious with her. "I suppose that hasn't changed since the last time I saw you. I remember you being a very serious boy."

"It's not that I was too serious. You were just never serious enough," I returned, squatting down next to her in the snow. I wasn't worried about Runa catching her death of cold even though she was half-pushed into a pile of icy slush; she might be a thief, but she was still a Nord. "You always took too many risks. Do you remember that first day you talked to me?"

"I brought you sausages and bread," she said with a smile.

"And kept some of it for yourself," I pointed out. "You acted like you could never get caught."

"You say that I took too many risks, but you were the one who ran away in the end," Runa replied, her smile turning sad. "When Grelod got killed, we knew you kept your promise… but then you never came back. Samuel said you must have died up in Windhelm. He thought the Brotherhood might have killed you or something."

"Why would the Brotherhood take my contract but kill me too?" I asked in confusion.

"Who knows why the Dark Brotherhood does anything?" she shrugged. "Truth is, I never thought you were dead. I figured you must have just decided you didn't want to be around us anymore and got some soft-hearted adults to take you in."

"Runa…" I started to say. "It wasn't like that. I was going to come back, but…"

"But what?" she asked, her tone angry now. "Did you forget the way?"

"I saved all of you from Grelod!" I half-shouted at her. "I almost died doing it!"

"Saved us?" Runa replied. "You might have gotten old Grelod killed, but it didn't save us."

"What do you mean?" I asked, my blood turning colder than the Solitude night.

"Get your mutt off me, buy me a mead, and I'll tell you the whole story," she said. Pavot snarled at her for being called a mutt, but my hand on the scruff of his neck quieted him down.

"I've got to stash the lute first," I told her, not willing to give her another chance to steal it from me, "but I want to hear the story." I thought for a moment before continuing. "Meet me tonight at the Winking Skeever, just after sunset."

She nodded sullenly, starting to stand as Pavot took his weight off of her. Pavot suddenly leaned forward again, forcing her back into the snow and locking eyes with her. She held up her hands in a posture of surrender, but didn't take her hazel eyes away from the wolf's blue ones. Something invisible seemed to pass between them, and the wolf finally backed off a few steps to let her stand up.

Runa eyed the bag with the lute in it, and I shifted it onto my shoulder to make it clear she wasn't taking it again. She smiled, put the toe of her boot under the dagger I had taken from her and kicked it into the air, where she caught it without looking. She sheathed the knife without taking her eyes off of me.

"See you tonight, Aventus," she purred, backing away from me. "It's a date."

As she vanished into the dark night, I couldn't help but wonder how she had left me feeling like she had gotten the upper hand again, even though I had what we had been fighting over.

I spent an hour doubling back through the streets of Solitude until I was certain I hadn't been followed. Once I was absolutely sure no one could have tracked me through the dark and snow of the Skyrim night, I crept through back alleys until I reached Proudspire Manor and silently let myself in through the side door. This time, I was ready for the intense dark in the basement; I had put a lantern and striker right next to the door before leaving.

As I stripped out of my armor and changed into plain clothes again, I could feel worry creeping into my bones. The fact that Runa knew my name and face was beginning to hit home, like a cold snake coiled in the pit of my stomach. No one had ever known the whole truth of me before, and revealing my face to an outsider—even a member of the Thieves Guild—was a serious risk for an assassin. I didn't think that she would reveal my secret… but what if she did? What if I was wrong about her?

I slunk through the corridors of the manor to my room, bringing Pavot along with me for mutual warmth. Even though I was sore and bone-tired, I made sure that all of my gear was safely hidden away before anything else. After all of my reckless behavior chasing after Finn's Lute, I was beginning to revert to a more cautious outlook on things. The lute itself I put into an old clothes chest at the foot of my bed, dropping some linens over it, and then locking the chest. It wouldn't keep out someone who knew it was there—but the whole point was that no one should know where it was now.

With everything safely stowed away, I finally shrugged off my shirt and trousers, collapsing into bed with a relieved sigh. I barely managed to get a blanket pulled up over my shoulders before passing out.

When I woke up, Pavot was curled up against me, his doggy breath chuffing into my face as his feet occasionally kicked with the force of some sort of dream. It was still night out, and the windows betrayed no hint of light from outside. I half opened my eyes, listening to the room while keeping my breathing level. Something had woken me up.

I wasn't alone in the room.

I quietly moved my free hand—the other was trapped under the ice wolf's weight—toward my pillow. I kept a spare knife under my pillow in Proudspire Manor and back at the Bards College. If I had learned anything from Cicero, it's that you could never have too many knives. As my hand touched the hilt, the floorboards creaked ever-so-lightly. A tiny sliver of moonlight peaked through the window, casting the room in a grey half-light. I could barely make out the shape of a figure out of the corner of my heavy-lidded eyes.

Part of me began to panic at the sight. Too many of my nightmares had begun just this same way—alone in a room, with someone moving around at the edges of my sight. It wasn't until they came closer that I could see Rolff Stone-Fist or Grelod the Kind or Vigurl Deep-Water, snarling for vengeance against me. I suppressed the fear and concentrated on the reality of the knife in my hand. In my dreams, I was always helpless. No, this was real.

I waited until the figure shifted its weight again, then sat up in one swift motion and threw the dagger at it as hard as I could. I rolled away from Pavot and came up to my feet, grabbing for another knife. The figure thrashed on the ground, kicking and jerking as the knife I had thrown claimed its life. I found my face twisting into an ugly smile. I didn't enjoy killing for its own sake as much as some of my brothers and sisters—but there was a part of me that did enjoy it.. I leaned down, groping for the lantern I kept on my nightstand.

As I lit the lantern, my smile disappeared and the breath stopped in my throat. Laying there in a pool of spreading blood was Dagny, her eyes hollow and unseeing. My knife was stuck in her pale throat, just as it had been in Vigurl's. I started shaking my head, trying to deny what I was seeing. I looked toward the bed, only to find that Pavot was nowhere in sight. Instead, Nelkir was standing there, a bloody long sword in one hand, its tip resting on the ground. In his other hand, he held a severed human head by the hair. It was Runa's, her mouth open in a frozen scream of terror.

"Happy birthday, Aventus," he said, black blood welling up from his mouth as he spoke and running down his chin to stain his fine clothes.

Before I could begin screaming, I woke up.

I stumbled through the next morning like a draugr, half-dead and grumbling. Jordis was concerned about my health to the point of checking me for fever every few minutes during breakfast, but I was finally able to convince her that I had just slept poorly.

"I can't imagine why," she said with a shake of the head as she cleared the dishes. "Your bed looks so comfortable." She got a dreamy look on her face as she began to immerse the dishes in water. "So comfortable…"

"The bed isn't the problem," I muttered. "Bad dreams."

"You're pushing yourself too hard at school," Jordis said sagely. "My youngest brother had the same problem. Only he was a soldier, not a bard. He would work himself half to death worrying about his training drills, about what his sergeant thought about him, about his uniform being clean enough. All sorts of things. And when he had leave, he would come home and barely be able to sleep from all the worrying."

"What happened with your brother?" I asked, finally starting to wake up a little. "Did he get over worrying so much?"

"You could say that," Jordis responded with a sad smile. "He was killed in battle by the Forsworn." I started to open my mouth to apologize, but she waved it off. "It was a few years ago." She started wiping plates, turning away from me. "It really helped me to understand something, though."

"What's that?" I asked.

"That there's no point worrying about things," she said, finally looking back at me with red-rimmed eyes, "because you're either worrying about things you can control, or about things you can't control. The things you can control, there's no reason to worry about as long as you're doing your best. And the things you can't control… Well, you can't do anything about them, so there's no point upsetting yourself."

"You're saying that people shouldn't try their hardest then?" I said, trying to understand her.

"Of course not," she said with what was almost a sharp look. "Everyone should always try their best. I'm just saying that when you're not training, or planning, or doing, you shouldn't get yourself all twisted up." She paused, then shook her strawberry-blond locks in frustration. "Maybe I'm just being stupid. Wouldn't be the first time."

"I don't think so," I told her. "I think you're actually a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for, Jordis." She smiled a little at that, but it was a smile that said she thought I was just humoring her. "It's just hard for some people to learn how to relax that much, I guess." That was an understatement, really. Most of the assassins I knew were wound tighter than steel wire; Garnag was the exception.

"Will you be back for dinner?" she asked, changing the subject.

"Probably not," I said with some real regret. I had to make a point to spend more time with Jordis; she was a kind person, and I liked that. "I have some things to do tonight, and then I have to get back to school for class tomorrow."

She nodded, and impulsively I hugged her. It was an awkward gesture, since I wasn't used to touching people, but she seemed happy that I had tried. She embraced me back and told me to be careful.

Sadly, it's the one piece of advice I've never been good at following.

As soon as I was out the door, I walked around back to the patio at the rear of Proudspire Manor. I normally enjoyed the sea breeze that came up off the cliffs below Solitude, but it was a chill wind today and I shivered in the sudden cold. Pavot was lounging on the patio, curled up against a stone bench, and I stooped to scratch him behind the ears. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn't recall letting him out this morning. I shrugged it off, supposing that Jordis must have been thoughtful enough to do it for me; it was just like her.

"She's not going to see you today either," came a voice from behind me. I forced myself to not jump at the sound, but it was very difficult. I hadn't heard anyone moving, and I certainly hadn't seen anyone. Pavot growled deep in his throat but didn't move from his spot as I stood to look at my unexpected guest.

Standing no more than ten feet from me was Nelkir. How had he gotten onto the patio without me seeing him? I could see some snow dusting the cuffs of his trousers, which meant that he must have leapt across—like Frothar and I had done one day—but he had done it without drawing my notice at all. I cursed myself for being so distracted and sloppy; civilian life would get me killed yet.

"Good morning, Nelkir," I said as though his appearance were the most natural thing in the world. "I take it you mean Dagny?"

"You take it correctly," he said, mocking my polite tone. I could feel my cheeks begin to burn at his snide response. "By the gods, she's certainly done a number on you. She'll have you saying 'milord' and 'milady' before you know it, and holding your pinkie finger out while you drink tea."

"I don't like tea," I said automatically.

"You will by the time she's done with you," he laughed. "Be thankful for a day of freedom!"

"Is Dagny still not feeling well?" I asked, trying to keep my voice civil.

"If by 'not feeling well,' you mean 'bleeding like a stuck pig,' then yes," he chuckled. Nelkir walked up to me and clapped me on the shoulder with a smile that looked out of place on his pale, drawn face. "That means it's just you and me today."

"I beg your pardon?" I said, genuinely confused. I was also somewhat uneasy about Nelkir touching me; I didn't like being touched by strangers at the best of times, and something about Nelkir's fake-cheerful shoulder slapping put me off. His hand was far too warm for the weather, almost like there was a fever burning inside his thin frame. I wondered, not for the first time, if Nelkir was sick.

"If you're going to be dating my sister," he proclaimed, snaking his arm around my shoulders and walking me away from Pavot, "then you and I are going to have to become friends."

"Nelkir," I started with a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, "I'm glad that you want to be friends, but I was really planning on spending the day with Dagny."

"And she can't make it," he reiterated as though talking to a slightly slow child, "so you have plenty of time to come drinking with me." At my look of surprise, he laughed and pulled out a coin purse. "No fear, I'm buying. I know that a student has a limited budget for fun, so the drinks are on me today." He leaned in conspiratorially and lowered his voice as though someone might overhear, cupping his hands around his mouth melodramatically. "Actually, my father is paying for drinks, but don't tell Frothar or he'll get all in a huff about it." He laughed wildly again.

"Are you sure you aren't already drunk?" I asked with growing amusement.

"Not 'already,' Aventus," he insisted, then leaned so close his breath tickled my cheek. "More like 'still.'"

I couldn't help myself. Despite his unwanted closeness and my previous worries about him, something about Nelkir's demeanor made it impossible to stay annoyed at him when he was cheerful. I burst out laughing, feeling a weight lift from me. It felt good to just let go, and within a few moments both of us were laughing our fool heads off in the middle of a gathering snowfall. White flakes clung to Nelkir's dark locks, giving him an air of softness he didn't normally possess.

"Fine then," I finally conceded, wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes. "You can buy me a drink—one drink!" I insisted. "It's barely noon yet."

"Aventus," Nelkir said with a smile, throwing his arm around my shoulders again, "it's already evening somewhere in the world. Don't be so provincial!"

I can't tell you where the day went. One drink turned into two drinks, and two drinks turned into I-don't-know-how-many. Nelkir ran me from one tavern to the next, buying drinks for the few people who had meandered in so early in the day, leading rousing toasts to the Empire, and rushing off again before I had time to do more than gulp down my mead. I've never cared for the taste of mead. But once you've had a few of them, you don't care so much about the taste.

We chatted about life in Solitude, about what Whiterun had been like before the Stormcloaks came, we sang "The Age of Aggression" more times than I can count, and we got into at least one brawl that I think we won. Everything was a blur after the first hour, except for the occasional moments of terrible sobriety brought on by the stinging cold and whipping snow whenever we stepped out of one tavern to go looking for the next one.

"We drink to our youth," we howled together in the streets, "for the days come and gone! For the age of aggression is just about done!" We were off-key and probably mangled the words a few times, but we didn't care. "We'll drive out the Stormcloaks and restore what we own! With our blood and our steel, we will take back our homes!" As we passed by random strangers, they would harmonize with us for a line or two before laughing and waving us on our way.

Under all of the sullenness, the bad humor, the angry looks, I was beginning to discover a Nelkir that I don't think Frothar or Dagny ever saw. He was a carouser and a heavy drinker, but he was spreading goodwill for the Empire everywhere he went, as surely as any bard I'd ever seen. We never left a tavern without the patrons lifting a mug in Jarl Elisif's name, and usually with them proclaiming her the High Queen of Skyrim. We never left a tavern without the staff smiling at Nelkir's generosity and the customers slapping him on the back as we left. Even when we got into a fight, the losers were laughing it up by the time we all hauled ourselves off the ground and back to the bar for another round.

Nelkir spread good cheer wherever he went, and by the end of the day, he had none left for himself.

Our last stop was the Winking Skeever. It had taken every ounce of willpower I had to keep from forgetting about my meeting with Runa, so I kept steering us to other places. I figured if we hit the Skeever last, then at least I would pass out in the place I needed to be. I wasn't thinking especially clearly by this point; if I had been in my right mind, I never would have considered losing consciousness in a place where I was meeting a potential enemy.

As we sat at a corner table together, Nelkir still drinking and me nursing a mug of hot tea, I could see his good mood slipping away by inches. His face had turned pensive and brooding, his dark eyes seeming to disappear into the shadows cast by the tavern's dim lights.

"What's wrong?" I asked him, feeling the tea beginning to restore my wits if not my equilibrium.

"Nothing," he said sullenly. "Everything." He took a deep drink from his mug and slammed it back on the table, drawing nervous looks from the serving maids. "You know what the worst thing about a good day is, Aventus?" he asked. I shook my head. "It ends. It always ends." He knocked the empty mug over with one finger, watching the few remaining drops spatter on the table.

"My mother said that good days are our strength for when we have bad ones," I told him.

"Doesn't sound like Diana," he said glumly. "She mostly talks in insults."

"My real mother," I replied. That was something she had said, long ago. I hadn't thought about it in years. "You don't like Diana then?"

"She gets away with too much," he said bitterly. "If I tried half the things she does with Balgruuf, he'd have me disowned and exiled."

"I guess being the Dragonborn goes a long way," I said, not being willing to argue about it. Diana wasn't perfect, that much I could agree with—but I was too hopelessly in love with her to be able to acknowledge more than that.

"That's the world for you," Nelkir said, standing up shakily. "Special people get to walk all over the rest of us."

"I think you're special, Nelkir," I said before I could stop myself. My cheeks burned with embarrassment, which was only heightened by his gale of harsh laughter.

"No, I'm not," he cackled. "Nor are you, Aventus Aretino—not compared to luminaries like Jarl Balgruuf the Greater or Diana Dragonborn. In a century, you and I will be dust and they'll be legends." He paused for a moment, leaning against the table with both hands as though holding himself steady in a stormy sea. "You'd think that people who shined so brightly would give off more light to those around them, but we just get to live in the shadows of their greatness."

"Do you need help getting home?" I offered, half-standing before he waved me off.

"I'm not going home," he slurred. "If I go home, Dagny will ask me if I've seen you, and I don't feel like lying to her at the moment."

"Why would Dagny ask…" I trailed off, furrowing my brow in confusion. I looked up at him, my stomach churning suddenly with realization. "You lied to me." It wasn't a question. "Dagny wasn't sick at all. She was waiting at home for me this whole time."

"Yes," he admitted, "but didn't you have fun today?"

Nelkir laughed as he walked toward the door. My fury came boiling up out of me and I stood, intent on following him out into the street. I wasn't sure what I intended to do once I caught him, but before I could close the distance, someone stepped into my path.

"I'm not running that late, am I?" asked Runa, pulling her hood back from her eyes and shaking snow from her boots as she walked into the Winking Skeever. "You look pissed."

Nelkir paused just outside the door to the tavern, looking back at me with wicked amusement on his face.

"Maybe you don't care that much about missing out on a day with my sister after all," he jibed as I tried uselessly to push past Runa. She looked back the dark-haired boy in confusion.

"Who the hell is this guy?" she asked. "And why does his sister care what you do?"

"She doesn't know about Dagny?" Nelkir asked in mockery. "Well, well, well. Which one is the 'other woman,' I wonder? Aventus Aretino, a two-timer. I never would have guessed."

"Gods damn you, Nelkir," I finally hissed in frustration. Runa finally stopped holding me back, but by the time I disentangled myself from her, and got outside Nelkir had already vanished into the night. I could hear him belting out the lines of "The Age of Aggression" as he disappeared into the snow.

"We're the children of Skyrim and we fight all our lives!" his voice echoed back to me, fading as he got farther away. "And when Sovngarde beckons, every one of us…"

I paused in the street, dizzy and feeling the beginnings of a hangover creeping in. I had been drunk—drunker than I had ever been before—most of the day, but trying to sober up for much of the last hour. I had no idea if the headache and nausea were symptoms of starting a hangover or just being so upset at Nelkir that I could chew iron bars and spit nails. Dagny was going to be so angry at me; I didn't even know if I could point the blame at Nelkir without making her even angrier. She would probably believe me, but then she would be angry at me for believing Nelkir and angry at Nelkir for tricking me, and she would just wind up twice as angry.

"If I'd known you had a prior engagement," Runa drawled behind me, "I would have shown up fashionably late."

"It was nothing," I said without looking back at her. I kept staring into the snowy Solitude night, as though if I stared hard enough, Nelkir would suddenly reappear.

"It didn't sound like nothing," she replied. "It sounded like you're dating that guy's sister and he thinks you're cheating on her with me." She pressed up against my back in such a way that I couldn't tell if she was trying to be sensuous or just trying to steal my coin purse. "Not that we're anywhere near that yet, mind you. And what's an assassin doing with a girlfriend any-"

Before she could finish, I whirled around and pushed her against the wall of the tavern. I'd had enough of people winding me up, thinking that they were so much cleverer than me.

"You shouldn't call me an assassin in public," I whispered into her ear. "And assassins do as they damn well please. 'Nothing is forbidden.'" It felt good to quote Nazir; it made me feel a little more confident.

The fear in her eyes brought me back to myself a little. I couldn't deny that it felt good to see genuine worry on Runa's face after all she had done to me yesterday, but this was someone I had once called a friend. What sort of person did it make me to treat her so? Not the sort of person I wanted to be. Cicero would have been proud of me, I suddenly thought, and that realization made me back away from her suddenly in shame.

"I'm sorry," I said, rubbing my hands across my face. "It's been a long day."

"Apology accepted," Runa said, though her tone told me that she was accepting more from fear of what would happen if she didn't than because she thought I was sincere. She shook herself once and seemed to recover some of her street-tough demeanor. "You'll probably wind up apologizing a lot more than that before the night is through, even for things that aren't really your fault." She gestured toward the tavern door.

"Let me guess," I said as I walked into the Winking Skeever. "Drinks are on me?"

"A lot of drinks," she agreed heartily, following me in out of the cold.

I groaned inside. It had been a long weekend, and it didn't look like the next week was going to be any easier.

…to be continued…


	8. Paved with Good Intentions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus gets in touch with his past and discovers--in more ways than one--that good intentions aren't enough.

Chapter 8: Paved With Good Intentions

 

I was still fuming by lunchtime, and the others could tell. Aia and Jorn were content to let it be, but Ataf had started to grow brave again. Ever since he had learned my secret—one of them anyway—he had been backing off more, but my foul mood was starting to bring back the nosy boy I had met my first day of class.

"Everything all right, Aventus?" he asked directly. I was tempted to blow him off, but Ataf had done me a favor recently, which made me reluctant to just dismiss him.

"I just don't like lessons that glorify tyrants," I replied, "or their lieutenants."

"Professor Gemane didn't mean anything by it," the Redguard boy insisted. "As bards, we have to learn neutrality, even if we don't like it. Picking sides can get you killed during wartime. As long as we keep up a public air of being neutral, regardless of our actual feelings, we can go anywhere we like. No one would violate tradition by hurting a bard any more than they would a messenger."

"It definitely lets both sides spy on each other more easily," Aia said airily.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"You really hadn't considered it?" she responded with her own question. "I swear, Aventus Aretino, you're a remarkably direct sort of person."

"What Aia means," Illdi interrupted, seeing my face darken, "is that she thinks pretty much everyone uses bards as spies in wartime." Jorn and Ataf looked at her with the same kind of disbelief that was on my face, until she blushed and shrugged, seeming to wilt under the attention.

"I thought bards were supposed to be neutral," I said, feeling my anger leaking away at this turn of the conversation. It was shocking, but rather interesting at the same time.

"They're supposed to seem neutral," Aia clarified. "Bards are people, and people have opinions about politics. But by coming from an apolitical tradition, bards can claim rite of passage through even the worst battlefields without too much fear. And while they're there, if they should happen to see troop movements or numbers…" The Imperial girl shrugged broadly, feigning an innocent demeanor.

"Even if a general were paranoid enough to turn bards away from their borders," Jorn mused, "that would tell the other side something."

"I think this is all just speculation," Ataf said, shaking his head. "Reputation is everything to a bard. Being caught doing that sort of thing even once would kill a man's reputation—and worse, stain his whole profession." He shook his head again. "No, I don't believe it. Bards are supposed to have a professional code of ethics—a bard's honor, I guess you could say."

"So naïve," Aia said with a smile. "The only real difference between an honorable man and a dishonorable man is that the honorable man never got caught."

"I wouldn't say that Ataf is being naïve so much as you're being cynical," Jorn told her, his mouth turned in a sharp curve downward. I found it interesting that he had been willing to listen to Aia impugn the honor of bards, but seemed offended when she suggested that honor itself was an illusion.

"I still don't see the point of the exercise," I said, trying to turn the conversation away from becoming an argument. "Diana Dragonborn and General Tullius are heroes. Ulfric and Lydia are traitors. That's the whole story."

"Unless you're a Stormcloak," Illdi said. "Then you'd think that Ulfric Stormcloak is a noble hero rebelling against an unjust empire, and Lydia Stormblade is the Dragonborn."

"But we know that Diana is the true Dragonborn, of course," Ataf said quickly, knowing that this was one of my sensitive topics. "She appeared in court and Shouted and everything."

"Were you there?" Aia asked. "Did you see it yourself?" Ataf grudgingly shook his head. While I knew the truth, I couldn't very well admit it. More to the point, Ataf was wrong—Diana hadn't Shouted to the court, though she had certainly threatened to. "Then it could just be Imperial propaganda. Oh, I'm not saying it is, of course. Just that Professor Gemane has a point—truth depends very much on where you're standing. You can only see the words on a sign from in front of it. From behind, it just looks blank. It's the same thing with people."

"I suppose," I grumbled. "I just don't understand how the people supporting Ulfric can be so wrong."

"Aventus," said Aia with another of her inscrutable smiles, "I'm sure they would think the same thing about you."

My head hurt and my stomach ached. I continued to nurse hot tea while I ordered a mug of mead for Runa. The serving maid looked at me sidelong now that Nelkir had left. He had been paying for the drinks since we arrived, and his little outburst before he ran off had the staff in a bad mood. Even the other customers were giving us sidelong glances now, wondering what I had done to piss off the person that had been buying their drinks for the last hour. Just to assure the waitress of my good intentions, I pushed a few septims onto her tray before she left.

"I don't know what you did to piss that guy off," Runa said, taking a pull from her mug, "but I'd watch my back. Anyone who winds you up that much is probably out to do worse."

"Thanks for the advice," I said in a tone that indicated I wasn't interested in any more. "We're not here to talk about my personal problems."

"I suppose not," she allowed with a magnanimous nod. "We're here to talk about much worse stuff. Like how you failed all your friends at Honorhall Orphanage."

"Grelod died," I hissed, speaking low and leaning across the table. "I swore I would get the Dark Brotherhood to kill her, and I did. I kept my promise. I kept my promise so well that I wound up being one of them."

"And believe me, I'm grateful," Runa said, leaning in with fierce eyes. "The day I saw that crone's broken body lying bleeding on the ground was the happiest day of my life. I thought that the Nine had come to answer my prayers." She drank deep, as if to quench the fire in her belly. "Then I realized that the Nine hadn't had a damned thing to do with it."

She shook her head and drank again, trying to drive away the shudders that wracked her. Part of me was glad to see that I wasn't alone in being scarred by my time at Honorhall. I still shook like that sometimes when I thought too long about my time there, and Runa had been there far longer than I had.

Part of me wanted to kiss her until the shaking stopped—until it stopped for both of us, as though kissing her would drive away the darkness and the fear.

I blinked rapidly to clear away the image of kissing Runa and drank more hot tea. I didn't know where the sudden urge to kiss Runa's rose-dark lips had come from, but I tried to convince myself it was just a passing fancy. She was pretty and we were close together and it was dark and I was still a little drunk. That was all.

That had to be all.

"Don't tell me that Constance turned out to be evil too," I said, trying to recover the thread of the conversation. Constance Michel had been Grelod's much-abused assistant. She did all the grunt work of running the orphanage and was even sometimes kind to the children, when she could get away with it. She drew as much verbal abuse from Grelod as any of her underage charges, and took it all with the complete serenity of a woman with a truly broken spirit.

"No, nothing like that," Runa replied. "Constance was never cruel to us, not like Grelod had been." She paused with a slight smile on her face, almost wistful. "Actually, with the old bitch dead, things improved in Honorhall a lot. Constance made sure we got lessons in reading and math, we started getting fed regularly, and she took the chains out of the punishment room. She threw them in the river while the kids stood around her, like a ceremony or something."

I smiled a little bit at the thought of it. I had been in those chains twice during my time at Honorhall—once for speaking out of turn, and once for crying. The first time, I had been in them for two days with no food or water. The second time, it was longer; I might have died if Constance hadn't snuck water in to me at night while Grelod slept.

"The thing is," Runa continued, her face turning sad, "we should have remembered." She drained the last of her mug as though trying to drown the bad memories. "Constance was kind, but she never went against Grelod directly. New kids came to the orphanage, kids that had never known how bad things were. Constance kept them separate from us—from the ones that had been there when Grelod was alive. It was like we were being quarantined, like we were sick.

"Then those kids started being adopted out. They would come for a while, then Constance would find families for them and they would leave." She paused, her eyes distant and haunted. "One day, Samuel went right up to her while she was laying out cookies to bake and asked her if she was finding families for us. Do you know what she told him?" I shook my head. "She said, 'Why would anyone want you?' Then she went right back to making cookies like nothing had happened."

"What?" I asked, disbelieving. "Did you get her to explain what she meant?"

"No need for explanations," Runa said sourly. "I understood. After what Grelod did to us… we were tainted. Different from other kids. Samuel and I were already thieves, and Hroar had started beating up kids for their toys. Some of the other kids that were still there when you left were worse. There was one boy, Francois. His parents left him at the orphanage, but he always insisted they would come back. After Grelod died and his parents still didn't show up… One day, he found a cat with a broken paw near the orphanage and brought it back. At first we thought he wanted a pet, but…" She gulped heavily and gestured to the serving maid for a refill.

"You don't have to-" I started, but she interrupted me.

"We found him later that night with the cat tied up to a post in the orphanage yard. He was throwing rocks at it and laughing when it screamed." I felt sick at the thought of it. I might have killed a dozen or more men and women, but the thought of hurting an animal without cause still made me nauseous. "Samuel and Hroar beat him half to death, and he just laughed the whole time."

"Sweet Mother," I breathed, making sure to stay quiet enough that no one else in the Winking Skeever could hear me. I didn't swear by the Night Mother often, but this felt like a time for it if ever there had been one.

"So you see," she continued with false cheer, "Constance couldn't dare let any of us get adopted, not with that sort of behavior. She was just going to keep us on at the orphanage until we turned sixteen, then turn us out without anywhere to go or anyone to give a damn. We didn't deserve that, didn't deserve to be treated like garbage because of what Grelod had made us. Even from the grave, that horrible bitch had her hands around our necks."

"Gods, Runa," I said, laying my hand over hers. "I'm so sorry."

"I told you that you'd be saying that before the night was over," she smirked. I couldn't help but laugh at the way she said it.

"I suppose you did at that," I allowed.

"For being right," she said with mock cheer, "you can buy me another drink." I looked at her mug and saw that the last refill had already gone. I hadn't even noticed her draining the mug.

"Fair enough," I allowed, gesturing to the waitress for another round. I had wanted to sober up, but now I only felt like getting drunk again. "All of that is pretty horrible, Runa… but I still don't see why you blame me."

"You said you'd save us, Aventus," she said darkly, casting her eyes down. "Not just that you'd kill Grelod, but that you'd save us all."

"I thought killing Grelod would save you all," I replied desperately. "I nearly died myself trying to get in touch with the Dark Brotherhood."

"I guess sometimes murder doesn't solve all the problems," she retorted.

"Well, it solves enough of them," I said with a hard edge to my voice. It was hard enough hearing Runa's story, but hearing her say aloud the very thing I had been fearing for months was almost too much.

Ever since I had accidentally killed Vigurl Deep-Water, part of me had been wondering if being in the Dark Brotherhood was really what I was meant to do with my life. I was good at my job—more than good, I had to admit. I was excellent at my job. But my teachers had always said that I had too much honor to be a good assassin, and my sense of right and wrong had nearly gotten me killed more than once. After I killed Vigurl, it nearly made me kill myself through slow starvation and despair.

It still felt good to deliver the Night Mother's judgment to the unworthy, but I wasn't blind to the other things we did. We took contracts just for money sometimes, thanks to Nazir's extensive network of spies and contacts. By tradition, most of a client's fee went to the Brotherhood itself, while a hefty portion went into the assassin's pockets. I was, by most people's standards, independently wealthy at the age of fourteen. I didn't have any expensive habits and didn't travel, so I had saved most of the money I had earned in the last two years. I could take what I had earned and buy a not-inconsiderable estate with it—if I cared for such things.

The Listener—Diana Dragonborn to some, Hecate to others—had sent me to the Bards College to gain the skills I needed to be a better infiltrator and killer. I understood now the value of the things I was learning here, how they would make me better able to blend into the background and kill with impunity. I hadn't expected to start enjoying my lessons—which led me to wonder if maybe I could develop the skills for a life outside the Brotherhood. It hadn't been much more than an occasional surreptitious fantasy until I had met Dagny…

The truth was that Runa was right: there were problems that couldn't be solved by murder. I just had to decide if I was right too—that enough of them could.

Runa and I talked well into the night, drinking and catching up on what we had been doing in the years since I left Honorhall.

Right about the same time that Hecate was running off to the Throat of the World against the Night Mother's wishes, Runa had been escaping Honorhall with Samuel and Hroar in tow. It hadn't been difficult for them; Constance didn't keep the same level of paranoid control over the children as Grelod had. As far as Runa knew, the guards had never even been informed of their departure. Constance must have been happy enough to have the problem solve itself.

The three of them had been living in the Ratways, the tunnels beneath Riften, and sneaking out at night to steal food and clothes from the shops that lined the canal. They had only been at it for about a month when they got caught—but not by an irate shopkeep. The man that found them had called himself Brynjolf, and he had been a member of the Thieves' Guild. Brynjolf had explained that all theft in the city was the Guild's to regulate and control, and that they could either join the Guild themselves or get the hell out of the city.

"He was nicer about it than that," Runa laughed, "but that's about what it came down to."

Given the alternatives, the three of them had joined up with the Thieves' Guild. The coin was poor and the accommodations unpleasant—like Hecate, I wondered how anyone could live in a sewer and still respect themselves—but they were free. I knew what it meant to be starving but free; freedom couldn't fill your belly, but it made the sting of hunger less.

"What happened to Francois?" I asked, wondering if he had recovered from the darkness Grelod had beaten into him.

"No clue," she responded casually. "We didn't keep track of anyone else in Honorhall after we left. Hroar and I figured that anyone who didn't have the guts to save themselves probably wasn't worth saving." She looked down at her mug and blushed slightly, slurring her words slightly from too much drink. "He even talked about you having more balls than the rest of us put together. I think he would have been proud of the man you turned into."

"Would have been proud?" I asked dumbly.

"He got killed a few months back," she said with a coldness I hadn't expected. "Dumb bastard was on a simple housebreaking job. He managed to get in and out without a hitch, but just before he got back to the Ratway, his pack slipped off and spilled everything he had snatched right in front of a town guard. He panicked and bolted. Guards didn't even try to take him in."

"Is Samuel still around?"

"Yeah," she responded, her face relaxing a little. "We partner up sometimes. He's still back in Riften, though. This was supposed to be my first big solo assignment."

"Sorry I screwed it up," I told her with genuine regret.

"More apologies means more drinks!" she shouted, holding up her empty tankard to catch a serving maid's attention. I sighed; while I was independently wealthy, most of my money was back at Dawnstar Sanctuary and the coin I had brought with me was largely tied up at the Imperial Exchequer's office. I touched my rapidly emptying purse and was suddenly grateful that Nelkir had been picking up the tab earlier. He still had a lot to answer for the next time I saw him, but his generosity had saved me some trouble.

"I think there's still a way you can make it right," she continued after her mug was refilled.

"I can't give you back the lute," I told her. "Not after all the trouble I went through to find it."

"Hey," Runa responded defensively, "I went through a bit of trouble here too. And it's not like you have a real use for the damned thing."

"Your assignment was just to deprive Erikur of his prize, right? Let him know he couldn't cheat the Thieves' Guild?" She nodded, her lips pressed together tightly. "Then you've already done your job."

"Bringing back the lute will net me a nice bonus, though," she pushed. "With as little coin as the Guild's been bringing in lately, every bit helps." She thought a moment, biting her lower lip in a way that I found thoroughly distracting. "On the other hand, there is something you could do if you really want to help me out."

"I'm listening," I told her.

As Runa explained her plan, I found myself grinning like an idiot. Both of us were giggling madly within a few minutes, drawing a few sharp looks from nearby tables, but we didn't care.

It was going to be glorious.

I woke up with a sour taste in my mouth, and one of my feet was cold. As I pried my sticky eyes open and rolled onto my back, I saw that I was laying on my dormitory bed, fully dressed except for one boot. I scanned the room dumbly, finally seeing the rogue footwear pushed up under my desk as though I had sat down to take it off, then stumbled the rest of the way to the bed and just flopped into it before passing out.

Bright light was streaming through the window, and I suddenly realized that it had to be after noon already. I sat bolt upright, completely awake, then immediately laid back down as my head swam and bile rose up into my throat. My head ached like someone was pounding it with a hammer, and the light was stabbing into my eyeballs. I clenched my eyes shut and concentrated on keeping my stomach steady.

Just as I was feeling well enough to sit up, the door swung inward and admitted Ataf, who was carrying a covered tray. He looked at me with something like sympathy before setting the tray down on my desk and wandering over to sit on his bed.

"Brought you some lunch," he said, pulling his shoes off. "I figured you could use something light, so I grabbed some soup and bread." A few moments before, the thought of food might have made me sick, but the smell of broth made me realize how hungry I really was. I got up, sat back down to pull my remaining boot off, then got up again and stumbled to my desk.

"Thanks, Ataf," I managed to croak out before uncovering the tray and breathing in the broth's steam.

"I also told our teachers that you were sick," he continued. "Do you even remember coming back this morning?"

"No," I replied honestly. I really didn't remember how I had gotten from the Winking Skeever back to the Bards College. The last thing that was clear to me was giggling with Runa over mugs of ale the night before. I touched my fingers to my lips briefly; had she kissed me at some point? I couldn't recall.

"I've been on a few benders myself," Ataf said in a tone almost admiring, "but I've never seen anyone as drunk as you were when you came in this morning outside a Redguard wedding. You woke me up, you know."

"Sorry about that," I told him as I started drinking the soup. "I went out drinking with Dagny's brother, and things got out of hand…"

"Who's Runa?" he asked. My blood ran cold and I nearly dropped the bowl. "You were muttering about some girl named Runa when you came back."

"Just an old friend I ran into," I said. It was even sort of true. "Did I say anything else?"

"Something about your mom, I think," Ataf replied, his teasing tone disappearing. "You really miss her, don't you?"

"Sometimes," I said. "My real mom died a long time ago, and I've never been away from my adopted family this long before."

"Well, I covered for you this time," he said, changing topics. "You're off classes for the day to recover. Try not to let it happen again, though." He tossed me his class journal, and I barely managed to catch it. "Our morning notes are in there, and our assignment for tomorrow." I flipped the journal open and turned to the most recent entry, scanning it as quickly as my aching eyes would allow.

"We're supposed to talk about the origin of 'The Age of Aggression'?" I asked, not sure I was reading the prompt correctly.

"More precisely, we're talking about the ways that songs and poems can change based on the performer," Ataf corrected, "and we're using 'The Age of Aggression' as an example. Something about historical context and blah blah blah."

"Seems dumb," I told him.

"Maybe," he laughed, "but Gemane's expecting serious discussion, so be ready to get your head in the game."

"Thanks again, Ataf," I told him as he began to pack up to head back out for the afternoon. "You did me a solid, and I won't forget it."

"That's what friends are for," he smiled.

As he left, I couldn't help but wonder if he was right. In my experience, real friends were few and far between. Ataf had helped cover for me missing morning classes because I was hung over. He had lied to people on behalf of our supposed friendship. Would he be so willing to help me if he knew I killed people for money? Or that I was in a cult of Sithis-worshippers? That I was hung over because I had spent the whole night drinking with a thief?

Would he cover for me if I had killed someone last night and come in covered in blood?

Sometimes, I wondered if everyone had secrets like me, and the only thing that let people care for one another was dishonesty.

I was too sick to do anything most of the day, but I managed to stagger out of the dormitory toward the evening hours.

After assuring Professor Six-Fingers that I was heading to see a healer and would be in class bright and early the next day, I wandered toward Proudspire Manor to see if I could explain to Dagny why I had missed our date, but one of the servants informed me that Jarl Balgruuf and his children would be out for the night. I assumed that Irileth would be with them, so I asked the maid to let them know I had stopped by whenever they came back.

After that, I was pretty much stuck for anything to do, so I just meandered back to Proudspire and sat on the back porch in the cold, not even letting Jordis know I had stopped by. Pavot came trotting up to me—how he had gotten out of the house, I wasn't sure—and laid at my feet, sensing my pensive mood.

I still felt lousy—physically and emotionally—and the idea that Dagny hated me now was churning me up inside way more than I would have thought. After all, she was just some spoiled nobleman's daughter who had taken me under her wing more to spite her brothers than because she actually cared about me.

Right?

Honestly, I wasn't sure anymore. Until Dagny had kissed me, I thought she was just using me for some political thing that I didn't really understand. I wasn't dumb enough to believe that she was genuinely attracted to me out of the blue. But then she had kissed me, and suddenly I was more willing to believe it—especially with Nelkir's reaction. If Dagny were just stringing me along, I don't think her brother would be so keen to ruin things between us. That meant she probably actually liked me.

But did I like her? I mean, I knew I liked Dagny's company, but the idea of something long-term with another person had never really occurred to me. Did I care for her the way she cared for me? And what was the way she cared for me? And what about Runa? I couldn't deny I was attracted to her, and that we had a bond that had been forged in a deeper, more painful way than with Dagny.

I absent-mindedly reached down to scruff Pavot behind the ears and had to jerk my hand back suddenly when he growled and snapped. My eyes widened in shock for a moment, worried that I had done something wrong, but then the ice wolf just laid his head back down and acted like nothing had happened. As I rubbed my fingers, I thought about something Babette had said to me a long time ago, not long after she first adopted the ice wolf.

"An ice wolf isn't a dog," Babette had told me. "Even if he likes you, he'll never be completely tame." She had rubbed Pavot's belly then, laughing as the pup's blue-black tongue lolled out in happiness. "A dog is a slave. A wolf is a partner. You have to give him space when he wants it."

I also remembered that Pavot had never bitten her fingers—not once. Maybe he had just recognized a more powerful predator when he saw one. He would have been doing better than me; I hadn't realized Babette was a vampire right up until she came out and told me, which came along with propositioning me to become one of them myself. Refusing had put her into a snit, indirectly leading to my supposedly temporary exile in Solitude. I certainly had a way with women—every one of them I had ever cared for was indifferent, insane, or impossible to get along with.

Sitting there in the cold, I watched the sun go down in the west over the Sea of Ghosts. As night came on, I wondered if all of my worries were a dog's worries. I was well-fed, well-kept and living in a cage. The cage door might be opened in a couple of years to let me out, but would I still be a wolf when that time came? Or would I have become too civilized to live in a wolf's world anymore?

My family—the Dark Brotherhood—were wolves, no doubt about it, so I had been raised by wolves, raised to be a wolf myself. Now I was expected to live like a dog so I could blend in among sheep better. The problem with wearing a mask, as Nazir explained to me once, was that the longer you wore it, the harder it was to take off. Eventually, if you weren't careful, you became the mask—and everything under it was just gone.

I wanted Dagny in my life, but part of me feared that she was just another layer of the mask I was wearing. If I added enough layers to that mask, I would forget myself. What use would I be to the Brotherhood then? There would be no place for a dog in a wolf's den. At the same time, was being a dog so bad? Wolves starved, they got hurt, and they died young. Wolves were hunted. Dogs were well cared for and admired.

But Runa was a wolf too—and she wouldn't want a dog. She had joined the Guild and I had joined the Brotherhood, but our paths had been so similar that we had fallen right back into being friends. She understood me and I could be myself with her. Even if I could leave the Brotherhood, it would be a part of my life that would always be a secret to Dagny. I could be honest with Runa—completely honest.

While I lay sick and dying some months back, when people thought I couldn't hear them talking about me, I had heard things that I hadn't understood at the time. Meena had said that I lacked conviction—the quality of character that allows a person to do things against their own conscience and not be broken by it. She put it in a different, more insane way, of course, but that had been the gist. I realized that my inability to pick between Runa and Dagny—to pick between the Brotherhood and a life outside of it—was proof that Meena had been right.

It took until the last dregs of sunlight vanished for me to decide that I couldn't make a decision. There was nothing to be done about it tonight either way. I sometimes missed my "adopted mother" in situations like this. Hecate might not always make the best decisions, but she at least knew how to make them.

Picking myself up and carefully petting Pavot—making sure that I was respecting his space this time—I headed back toward the Bards College. I had a lot of homework to do, and the next few days were probably going to be very annoying.

The next several days of class were annoying and unpleasant, punctuated by brief arguments with my friends over politics. Looking forward to the weekend was the only thing that let me focus on my work at all.

The only thing I heard from Dagny over the next few days was a brief note, delivered by a school page, that she would be dealing with family issues all week and wouldn't have any time for me until Loredas. I suppose it was better than getting nothing at all, but it was damnably quiet about the things I wanted to hear—that she didn't hate me, that she still wanted to see me.

Runa was as good as her word and didn't try to contact me at school. We both knew the value of maintaining a secret identity, and people being able to connect a pretty, leather-clad Nord girl with Aventus Aretino, the prospective bard, was bad enough without giving them a potential reason to connect me with a member of the Thieves' Guild. The fact that Nelkir had seen us together, however briefly, was also worrisome. I was still too angry to even consider trying to talk to him about it, though.

Each day of class drew us closer to the culmination of our last assignment before winter break: Professor Gemane's stupid point-of-view exercise. We had spent almost a week talking about the historical importance of bardic neutrality, and how that influenced the development of certain songs and poems. Particularly, he talked a great deal about the ways that politics forced music and poetry down certain paths. It had actually been sort of interesting up until he started waxing poetic about the innate heroism of the Stormcloak Rebellion.

"You always look so mad when Gemane starts talking about the Stormcloaks," Ataf commented during lunch on Fredas. "You'd think that Ulfric had kicked your puppy or something."

"I don't like bullies," I told him, somewhat sourly. "He has an incredible power that some people can only dream about, and he used it to murder his king. That makes him the villain, not the hero."

"Is killing a king always wrong then?" Jorn asked, scratching his chin. "I'm pretty sure that most of Tamriel would have rejoiced if someone had managed to take down Pelagius the Mad before his time."

"Or Queen Potema, for that matter," Illdi chimed in. We all looked at her; it was rare for the quiet Nord girl to voice a strong opinion about politics. She blushed before continuing, "I'm not saying what Ulfric did was right—I'm from here in Solitude, after all, and High King Torygg was a good man—but we Nords have a long tradition of settling 'right' and 'wrong' with violence, so it's hard to judge him. He's too big for regular people to judge."

"Too big?" I asked, not understanding. "No one is so big they're above right and wrong."

"What about the Dark Brotherhood?" Aia asked. I nearly choked and quickly drank some water to cover my panic as she continued. "The Empire purged their ranks a generation ago, but they were supposed to be 'beyond good and evil.' One story I heard back in Cyrodiil was that there used to be a statue of a Lucky Old Lady in Bravil, and if you prayed there for relief from life's misfortunes, the Dark Brotherhood would come and save you from them."

"The Dark Brotherhood are soulless murderers," Ataf snarled with far more vehemence than I would have expected from the normally mild-mannered youth. I looked at him with hurt eyes, but his expression only tightened further. "Don't tell me you believe in Aia's nonsense, Aventus?"

"Nonsense?" Aia said, offended. "Why, I never-"

"That's right," Ataf interrupted. "You never think about anyone else but yourself and your stories about how awesome life is in Cyrodiil!" Seeing Aia's face flash with hurt, Ataf opened his mouth to say something more, but then seemed to think better of it and simply walked away from the table.

"What was that about?" I asked once he was gone.

"Ataf told me that his oldest brother was murdered a couple of years ago," Jorn said quietly. "I guess he thinks the Brotherhood was behind it."

"By the Eight…" Aia muttered. "If I had known…"

"If you had known, would you have responded to Ataf's question differently?" Jorn asked, his voice carefully neutral. She looked away from the white-haired boy, managing to look abashed for the first time since I had known her.

"Ataf asked Aia out," Illdi whispered to me, learning in close. "He's probably still a little hurt from her saying no."

I nodded but stayed quiet, wondering if it was true that Ataf's brother had been killed by the Dark Brotherhood. Had my family taken someone from Ataf's family? Worse than that, I knew that if we had, he had probably deserved it. It was true that we sometimes took jobs for base coin rather than from prayers to the Night Mother, but in my time as an assassin, I couldn't honestly say we had ever taken a contract on anyone truly innocent…

In a flash, I realized that this was what they had all been trying to tell me about Ulfric Stormcloak. I had never doubted in the Night Mother's role as the silent voice of vengeance—or the Brotherhood's role as her servants. Our task was holy. But from outside, I could understand how people would see us as monsters, criminals, and worse. Was that how Ulfric Stormcloak felt too? Judged as a criminal for behaving in a way he saw as righteous?

The question haunted me for the rest of the day.

After school was out, I packed a few things for my weekend away from campus and noticed that Ataf was apparently already gone. It was unusual for him to leave the dormitories on the weekends, and I found myself hoping that he was okay.

The quick walk to Proudspire Manor was uneventful, but as I approached the front doors, I happened to see Frothar and Dagny standing on the front porch of their home, obviously waiting for someone. I supposed that it had to be Nelkir, and my face tightened at the thought of running into him. As I came up, I raised a hand and waved at them. Frothar smiled pleasantly and waved back, but Dagny turned away from me, turning her nose up slightly as she did. I could almost hear her sniff of disdain from thirty feet away, and my heart sank.

I dropped my hand limply to my side, and Frothar turned toward his sister, covering his mouth with a hand. I couldn't tell for certain, but his eyes made it seem like he was laughing. I felt my cheeks turn red as I turned away and started walking for Proudspire's stair. Before I could unlock the door, I heard footsteps behind me, and I turned, settling into a defensive stance. The last thing I needed today was Frothar trying to pound my face in for "disrespecting" his sister.

To my surprise, it was actually Dagny standing there, looking flushed and annoyed. I glanced over at Frothar, but the eldest son of Jarl Balgruuf was studiously ignoring the situation and carefully studying his manicured fingernails.

"Hi," I managed to stammer out, feeling immediately stupid for not being able to say anything wittier.

"A couple of weeks without seeing me and you completely forget how to talk," she replied, putting her fists on her hips. "I swear, Aventus Aretino, how did you ever survive before you met me?"

"Not very well," I admitted. For some reason, her flushed look became even deeper, and I suddenly realized that she was actually blushing.

"I was going to let you sweat until tomorrow," she said, stepping closer, "but when I saw how forlorn you looked, I realized it would be needlessly cruel. Like picking on a helpless animal."

"I'm no one's dog, princess," I said with more heat than I intended, but instead of recoiling from me, she only stepped closer.

"That remains to be seen," she replied before laying both of her hands on my chest and leaning up to press her lips against mine. I rested my hands gently on her hips and enjoyed the kiss until she leaned away.

"I didn't intend to stand you up," I told her. "Nelkir-"

"Oh, I already know," she interrupted. "When you didn't show up, my first thought was that you were hurt or something. Then Nelkir showed up late, reeking of ale and spinning a long, loving tale about how he happened to see you while he was out drinking—happened to see you enjoying a drink with a pretty Nord girl, brown-haired and wearing leather." I groaned internally and frowned, which only made Dagny giggle.

"You know I would never intentionally-" I started, only to be interrupted again.

"Of course you wouldn't," she said with a crooked smile. "You're too dependable by half, not to mention simple." She sighed and shook her head. "No, I've been Nelkir's sister long enough to know when he's trying to wind me up. It didn't take long to get him to admit that he lied to get you away from me and took you out to get you drunk."

"That's pretty much how it happened," I admitted.

"Well, I pretty well scoured his ears with my scolding," she told me. "He just laughed until I threatened to go to Father about it. That shut him up."

"Why would your father care?" I asked her.

"He's good friends with your mother," Dagny told me. "If he found out Nelkir was corrupting the Dragonborn's adopted son, he'd be good and mad about that. He might even take Nelkir's allowance away. That's more fearsome to him than almost anything else." She looked up into my eyes and smiled again, more genuinely this time. "Honestly, I half think that Father is planning on marrying me off to you to cement his friendship with your mother."

"But we've only known each other a couple of months," I stuttered.

"That's longer than most of my cousins knew their husbands before they got married," she laughed. "Nords don't believe in wasting time, hadn't you heard? Arranged marriages, even less so." She backed away a step and made a show of looking me up and down. "Still, I'm not sold on the idea of marrying you yet. You're going to have to give a better showing than you have been lately if you want my approval as well as Jarl Balgruuf's."

My jaw was hanging open, which made Dagny laugh uproariously before darting in to kiss me on the corner of the mouth. She reached up and pushed my chin until my teeth clicked together. I blinked rapidly to try and understand what had just happened as she danced away. Once she was back on her own porch, she linked her arm through her brother's and the two of them began to laugh. Frothar waved to me once as they began to walk away, and I managed to lift one hand to wave back.

Once they were gone, I found my fingers tracing their way up to where Dagny had kissed me, a spot that still tingled from the touch of her lips. I still didn't understand women at all, I concluded. Rather than try to figure it all out, I went inside and made my way to my room. I had work to do tonight, after all. Still, I couldn't help but feel a tiny thrill at knowing Dagny didn't hate me.

Marriage, though? As if I wasn't confused enough already…

It was time.

The frigid Skyrim night had closed in around Solitude, filling the streets with damp mist and puddles of half-frozen slush. The sky was as dark as the Void; clouds covered the stars, and the moons were in their darkest phase tonight. The streets would have been pitch-black save for the moving torches of city guardsmen and the occasional lighted street lamp.

Putting out the lamps around Thane Erikur's house had been easy enough. People underestimated the value of the sling as a weapon, but I had found that the ability to hurl a small missile with great precision was an invaluable tool in the arsenal of an assassin. Standing in the shadows of a nearby alley, I had simply waited until I heard Runa's all-clear whistle before using the leather strip to put a rock through each lamp's housing; the one time the lamp didn't go out immediately, the damp and drizzle did the rest of the job within a couple of minutes.

Once the night around Erikur's home was as dark as we could make it, giving us plenty of forewarning if any of the city guard approached, Runa and I made our way to the side door of the house. My previous entry strategy had been based around the need to break-and-enter if necessary, as well as not having a lookout; having a trained thief with me improved my options from "forced entry" to "quiet forced entry." I gave Runa a boost up onto the raised veranda, then climbed up with her help.

Runa quickly picked the lock while I kept watch. She mumbled and cursed about the lock's difficulty, even breaking a pick off and having to dislodge the metal nib before continuing. Given how shiny and new the metal looked, I could only guess that Erikur had beefed up his locks since the last time we were here. Finally, she managed to get the lock open and we slipped inside just as a torch-carrying city guard came around the corner.

We hunkered down inside the house, waiting until the guard's pattern carried him down the street, before moving on. I was fondly reminded of two-man jobs I had done with Garnag, and I briefly wondered how he was doing up in High Rock. I made a mental note to write him a letter soon before returning to the present and focusing on the job at hand.

The two of us ghosted through the house, efficiently scouting each floor. We quickly discovered how deep Erikur's paranoia had gone since the last time we had been here. Across the hall from his trophy room, one of the guest rooms had been converted into a makeshift guard room. Three burly-looking guards were sitting around a table, playing cards with the door open; occasionally, one of them would stand up from the table, grab a lit lantern, and patrol the hall. We had no idea how frequent these guard patrols were, but we didn't need to—Erikur's valuables weren't our goal tonight. Instead, we hid ourselves until the first guard passed our hiding place, then quickly made our way to Erikur's master bedroom.

The door was locked but not barred. This was where all of our planning could fall apart; if the lock was too difficult for Runa to get open before the house guard came back through, we'd wind up having to kill at least one person tonight—maybe several. Strangely enough, my usual reservations about killing anyone who got in my way weren't as loud as normal. The thrill of breaking into a house with a half-baked plan and violence in my heart had dispelled most of my worries.

I wondered, was this what Cicero felt like all the time?

Fortunately, Runa was able to get us past the lock silently, and we slipped into the sleeping thane's bedroom. His snoring made far more noise than our footsteps. Runa relocked the door from inside, then the two of us moved the heaviest dresser in the room to block it. If all went well, the guards would never know we were here at all, but better to be cautious.

Once all the preparations were in place, I threw the window open, letting in a cold breeze. Erikur turned over in his sleep and shivered, finally waking to a pitch black room. He muttered and looked in the direction of the open window. My better night vision told me that his face was confused, as though he were trying to remember why he had left the window open.

That was when Runa lit the bedside lantern.

Erikur's eyes went wide and his mouth went open to scream. Runa jammed a rolled-up sock into his gaping mouth and put the tip of her dagger under his chin.

"None of that now," she said pleasantly. Erikur continued to scramble away from her, as though he could climb up the headboard of his bed and fly away. She roughly grabbed the back of his neck and held him in her vice-like grip. When he finally stopped struggling, she let go of him. "We need to have a conversation, so I'm going to pull the sock out of your mouth—but if you scream…"

He nodded rapidly but shallowly, trying to keep his double chin away from the sharpened point of Runa's knife. His eyes continued to be wide and fearful, but he was showing remarkable control for a man who had awakened to a murder threat.

"You tried to cut the Guild out of a deal, Thane Erikur," Runa said menacingly. "We don't much care for business partners who try to cheat us."

"I don't know what-" he started to say, before Runa laid a finger across his lips, shushing him like a patient parent. It chilled my blood; how many times had I seen Grelod make that same gesture right before knocking a tooth out of a child's mouth with her gnarled fist? Instead, Runa just patted him on the cheek once he fell into quiet again, and I quickly recovered my nerve.

"Don't bother lying," she commanded. "We know."

On my cue, I stepped out of the shadows, letting the lantern-light spill across my red-and-black armor, the black hand of the Dark Brotherhood prominent on my breastplate. Erikur's mouth went wide again, and Runa only kept him from screaming by jamming the sock back into his mouth. His nightgown went dark at the crotch and I grinned under my concealing cowl.

This was going to be fun.

…to be continued…


	9. The Darkest Night of the Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus faces a dark night and a terrible trial, on top of girl trouble and bad grades.

Chapter 9: The Darkest Night of the Year

 

The night was as black as the Void itself, filled with a biting wind and tearing fingers of ice. Snow and sleet mixed together in the whipping gale, flowing almost sideways through the streets of the city. I was hardly dressed appropriately for the weather, stripped to a light shirt and trousers. At least I was wearing boots; my feet probably would have shattered and broken off already if I had been wearing soft shoes. My face was red from the cold even as the rest of me was boiling hot from all the running.

The blood on my hands was rapidly freezing into a hard crust as I ran through the frigid Solitude night, and the skin under it was going numb. My lungs burned with the exertion, but I could still hear the shouts of guards behind me, before me, to the sides. They were spreading out in a net, and I would soon be caught. If I were lucky, I would go into a small cell long enough for my reputation to be ruined, then face a headsman. The Brotherhood wouldn't be able to get me out of this one.

All I could think about was how disappointed Hecate was going to be when she had to stand over my corpse. Would she weep? Would Dagny?

I wasn't caught yet, though, and the chase was hardly decided. They were many, so they could outflank me, but I was skilled at avoiding pursuit and capture. If I could just stay ahead of them, I could lose them in the alleyways of the lower city around the market. I just needed a little luck.

A sudden light came out of the swirling snow ahead, blinding me for a moment as a blond-bearded Nord guard came skidding out of the side street. I came to a stumbling halt, nearly losing my footing on the ice as he opened his mouth to call for help.

Divines curse me, could I not catch a break?

I recovered from my surprise before he did and lunged forward. He tried to raise his sword defensively, but a quick twist of my hands deprived him of his weapon. I sent the sword flying off into the snow, and when his eyes tracked it, the flat of my hand caught him in the throat. Now voiceless, he doubled over and dropped his torch, the guttering flame sending shadows washing crazily through the flying snow. I didn't give him a second to recover, keeping up a brutal, punishing assault until he was unconscious.

Once he was down, I paused to listen for the sounds of pursuit. I couldn't hear anything but distant shouting over the sounds of the howling wind, so I could only assume that our altercation hadn't drawn any more attention. I seriously considered stealing his heavy fur cloak, but unlike many of my siblings in the Dark Brotherhood, I didn't believe in condemning a man to death for just doing his job. I did take his gloves, though, and quickly tucked his hands into his pants; he wouldn't lose his fingers to frostbite, and he would live as long as one of the other guards found him in the next hour or so. Nords didn't die from the cold as easily as other men.

As soon as he was arranged, which took far too long for my comfort and not nearly long enough to assuage my guilt, I took off again. The sounds of pursuit weren't getting any louder, so I breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like I was going to make it to safety after all. I frowned to think about it; after tonight, would anyplace in Solitude ever be "safe" again for me?

How did it come to this?

"You can't talk to me like that!" Erikur managed to snarl as he began to recover the tattered shreds of his courage. "Do you know who I am? I'm a thane of Solitude! Jarl Elisif personally-"

"Do you know who I am?" I interrupted. "Thanes and jarls don't mean much to people who killed an emperor." Erikur blanched in the torchlight.

"Where are my guards?" he murmured, more to himself than asking us. His eyes fixed on me, showing some of the steel that I would have expected from a man of his position—but only some. "Did you kill them already?"

"They're not my target, Thane Erikur," I returned, pulling a knife from my belt and holding it lazily in his direction. "Let's just say they won't be bothering us for the duration of our… conversation." I didn't normally use bladed weapons as my preference in the field, but they made more of an impression when intimidating or interrogating. People just weren't as afraid of maces as they were of knives—which was really a shame, since crushing force could do far worse things to a human body than cutting.

"Don't kill me!" he pleaded, all pretense of strength fleeing from him. His eyes welled up with heavy tears and I wrinkled my nose under my cowl at the sight of a grown man blubbering like a child. I heard Runa make a noise in the back of her throat, and I realized she was trying to keep from bursting out laughing at the stricken look on Erikur's face. I guess I just didn't find it as funny as much as I found it disgusting.

"Tell me, Thane Erikur," said Runa, stepping forward and pulling a blade of her own. "Do you remember the penalty for cheating the Thieves' Guild?" Erikur licked his lips and his eyes darted at me before nodding. "That's right: we call the Dark Brotherhood." She paused, running the tip of her knife under her chin as though thoughtful. "Of course, this can all stay off the books and you can keep your life…"

"What do I have to do?" Erikur begged between the tears and shudders.

"We already have the lute," she told him. "You're not getting it back, and it's off limits. Your collection can be incomplete permanently. More to the point, if it ever goes missing for any reason, we'll just assume it's you that took it."

"That's-" he started to protest, only to catch the words in his throat when I crouched down next to him and stared intently at his neck. "I'll make sure to arrange for extra security for the Bards College."

"Excellent," Runa said, sheathing her knife. "Don't ever try to cross us again, Erikur. You won't like the results. As a penalty for your little mistake, our cut is going up ten percent for the next year." He groaned again but gritted his teeth and said nothing as he nodded.

I sheathed my knife, assuming that our intimidation was essentially over. I smiled under my cowl; Runa and I were both going to get what we wanted, and no one had to die. Runa paused, looking down at him with a strange expression I could only half-read because of her mouth-concealing scarf.

"One last thing," she said. I looked at her, confused. This wasn't in the script. Before I could do anything to figure out what was going on, Runa whipped out the knife she had only recently sheathed, whipped it up between her fingers, and threw it into Erikur's leg. He gasped in a breath as he prepared to scream, and Runa quickly shoved a balled-up rag into his mouth.

I reached for Runa, but she brushed my hand aside and leaned into Erikur's face, their noses almost touching. She kept one hand pushed over the rag in his mouth while the other found the hilt of the knife that was stuck in him like a dart in a board. Blood was staining his sheets around the wound, and the older man was whimpering and faintly shrieking behind his makeshift gag.

"I made sure you're not going to bleed to death before you can pour a healing potion down your gullet to close up the wound," she hissed, "but you're damn well going to be feeling that for a few days. This little love bite is just a taste of what you'll get if we give you to the Brotherhood, Erikur." She yanked the blade from Erikur's leg and wiped his own blood off on his nightshirt. "Don't disappoint me. We were never here."

With that, she gestured to me that it was time to go. The two of us made our way back out into the house while Erikur struggled to pull himself out of bed to the cabinet where he kept his emergency stash. Before he could recover his breath enough to start screaming for help from his household, we were already vanished out into the dark, frozen Solitude night. The two of us raced through the dark alleys out of sight of guard patrols until we had reached our extraction point.

I managed to keep quiet until we got to where we had stashed our civilian gear—a hollowed out place in an wall behind a trash bin—but I couldn't keep it inside any longer once we were home free.

"What the hell was that, Runa?" I demanded angrily, pulling down my cowl.

"What was what?" she asked innocently, tugging her hood and scarf free.

"You know what I'm talking about!" I insisted. "Stabbing him in the leg wasn't part of the script."

"I improvised," she said blithely. "So what? It got the point across." She chuckled to herself after realizing that she had unintentionally made a pun. "Heh, point."

"Gods damn it, Runa," I started to say, only to be interrupted when she pushed me up against the alley wall and kissed me.

Her tongue darted into my mouth and her hands clamped down on my shoulders as she pressed her body against mine. My mouth opened, more from surprise than anything else—though I can't deny that there was something else there too. I felt a hunger in my belly like fire, pushing away the freezing cold of the night. My hands were roaming across Runa's body even as she was pulling open my armor at the collar, pulling her lips away from mine so that she could run her teeth across the skin at my neck. Her hands fell from my shoulders to start playing with my belt, tugging at the buckle insistently.

I managed to push her away before she undid my pants. She looked into my eyes, her own as hungry as I felt.

"Don't try to change the subject," I gasped out.

"You're no fun," she said with a pout, turning her back on me. She began pulling at the buckles of her armor, stripping to the waist. She pulled her clothes out of her pack and turned back toward me. I stared at her bare chest; Nords might not feel the cold like other men, but Runa apparently felt enough of it to have a visible effect. "Seriously, Aventus, you need to learn to loosen up a little bit."

"I don't consider stabbing someone in the leg 'fun,'" I said as dryly as I could muster, despite feeling like something was lodged in my throat. I managed to pry my eyes away from her chest, but looking at her eyes was hardly any better. They promised even more than her semi-nudity did.

"Maybe we can find something else you would prefer?" she suggested. Before I could answer, she pulled her shirt on and started pulling on a skirt over her leather pants. She giggled as I turned away to start pulling my own civilian outfit on. "Teasing you is almost as fun as stabbing people," she mused. "I'm looking forward to doing more of it."

I spent a minute thinking up a good retort, but by the time that I finished changing clothes and turned around, she was already gone. I wondered briefly if I was going to see her again, but I already knew the answer. Of course Runa would find me again. She was having too much fun winding me up to let it go now.

"You look chipper," Ataf commented as I came back in from my morning exercises. It was freezing cold out and the slush in the streets was turning to ice, but I wasn't about to shirk at least the semblance of an early workout.

"Do I?" I wondered aloud. Honestly, it was hard to keep the smile from my face and the bounce from my step. Going out with Runa and pushing around someone as sleazy as Erikur had made me feel like my old self. Even the surprise of him getting stabbed was barely bothering me anymore. Part of me wondered if that should worry me, but I just couldn't bring myself to care.

"Yes," he snapped, "and it's starting to annoy me." I looked over at my roommate. He was normally much more cheerful himself. This morning, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, his sheets rumpled around him with a sour expression on his face. It took a moment to remember what had happened the last time I saw him; with all of yesterday's excitement, it felt like it had been a month since I had seen him.

"Look, Ataf," I started, trying to dampen my own good cheer a bit, "I'm sorry about Aia." He looked at me with sharp surprise as I sat down on my desk chair. "I heard from Jorn."

"He's got a big mouth," Ataf muttered.

"Yeah, but it doesn't change anything. He said you asked her out?" Ataf nodded. "Was she mean about it?"

"That's the worst thing," he said, his expression sinking from annoyance to something more painful. "She's normally so nasty about everything, so I thought I could handle it if she was cruel. Instead, she was just very kind and proper and sweet. She said that she was flattered but that she didn't think of me 'that way,' and that she was just honored to be my friend." He shook his head with disgust, more at himself than her, I thought.

"Really, I'm sorry," I repeated. "You'll find someone, though."

"I don't want 'someone,'" Ataf told me forlornly as he flopped back onto his bed. "I want Aia." He half-sat back up to look at me. "No offense, Aventus, but I honestly don't think you're the best person to give me advice about relationships."

"Why not?" I asked, feeling a little hurt.

"Man, you can't even admit that you're dating that Dagny girl," he said with his first hint of real amusement. I felt myself blushing against my will, and he actually barked out a laugh at my discomfort.

"Dagny and me," I stuttered. "Well… it's complicated."

"Is there someone else?" he asked. I cursed under my breath; damn, Ataf could be observant.

"Sort of," I admitted. I had found that it was best to be as honest as I could with Ataf, if only so that he wouldn't press as hard when I needed to lie.

"Let me guess," he said, cheer creeping back into his face. "This 'sort of' girl is someone you used to know. She's someone you care about, but you're not sure how she feels about you. Dagny is safe and cute and rich—basically, everything a guy could want. But you're still not sure if you like this other girl more, because she's passionate and wild and tied up in your past. How am I doing?"

I gaped at him openly, and he did laugh this time.

"Ataf…" I said cautiously, "can you read minds?"

"Only yours, Aventus," he guffawed. "And only because you're so damned transparent." He laughed until tears leaked out of his eyes while I sat there, unable to keep from smiling along with him. If Ataf really could read my mind, I would have had to kill him long before this.

"I'm not that transparent, am I?" I asked.

"It's an old story, my friend," he replied. "My cousin Salmid had the same thing happen to him. There was a girl he was in love with and a girl that my uncle wanted him to marry, so he just courted both of them. He strung along these two poor girls for a year before he made up his mind."

"I'm not stringing along anyone," I said defensively.

"Whether you want to admit it or not," Ataf pushed on, "you're two-timing these girls. I don't know if you've slept with both of them yet, but the fact you're seeing them both without saying anything about it is emotionally dishonest."

"What do you think I should do then?" I asked, feeling my good cheer starting to drain away.

"If I were you?" he asked. I nodded, then he continued. "If I were you, I'd dump the other girl and marry Dagny. She's pretty enough, her family is rich, and she apparently cares about you. The other girl…" He paused, thinking. "Whatever you feel for her, Aventus, passion isn't enough to build a relationship on."

"We have more than that," I insisted. "We have history."

"The past isn't worth throwing away the future," Ataf retorted. I paused, thoughtful, and he went on. "Of course, you're not going to listen to me, any more than I can listen to you when you tell me to get over Aia. You can't reason with your heart, and you can't help who you love. This thing you have will run its course, no matter what advice I give you. I just hope that you come to your senses before you blow it with a girl as great as Dagny."

Ataf finally got out of bed, stretching as he grabbed a towel to head down for a morning bath. I decided that I would join him and grabbed my things too. A hot bath was exactly what I needed to clear my head. As I stripped off my sweat-soaked workout clothes, something occurred to me.

"Hey, Ataf," I called to get his attention. "What did your cousin wind up doing? Did he marry the rich girl or the passionate girl?"

"He married them both!" Ataf laughed before walking out into the hall. I stopped dead for a full minute, just too surprised to move. Did he mean both at once? Or one and then the other?

Finally, I shook my head and headed out to catch up with my roommate. I wish my problem was as easy to solve as all that, but somehow I didn't think that either Dagny or Runa would be up for it. Of course, neither Dagny nor Runa were the woman I really wanted—but it seemed harder and harder to remember that, the longer I spent away from home. Not that Hecate would ever notice me anyway…

I shook my head to clear it and headed for the bath. You couldn't help who you loved.

The rest of the week passed uneventfully. I saw Dagny only occasionally and Runa not at all. Ataf slowly seemed to cheer up from Aia's rejection, but things were still awkward between them at lunch time. All week long, the only topic that anyone seemed to care about was the upcoming winter break. During the coldest part of the year, the Bards College closed its doors for four weeks—partly to save on heating expenses, but partly to let students spend New Life Day with their families. I didn't have much to look forward to this year; I would be staying in Solitude over the break, since getting back to Dawnstar in midwinter was just too much trouble.

When I mentioned that I would be staying in the city over the holiday, my friends were incredulous.

"Seriously, Aventus?" asked Ataf. "You're not visiting your family? They're not visiting you?" His face was stricken, and my other friends looked like I had just announced that I had bone break fever and only had a week to live.

"It's not a big deal," I assured them. "No one likes traveling in winter in Skyrim."

"No one but Stormcloaks," Jorn laughed.

"I'm sure that the headmaster would let you leave early if you're worried about the snows," Illdi offered gently. I smiled at her and shook my head.

"I'll be fine," I insisted. "My family has a house here in the city. It's not like I'll be alone or anything. My mother's housecarl will be there."

"But not your family," Illdi replied.

"I'd rather be with them, of course," I said truthfully. "But I'll be fine."

Spending New Life Day with the Dark Brotherhood was one of my first really good memories. Even with how tense things had gotten last year, I would rather be back at Dawnstar Sanctuary than in Solitude. Still, I had to admit that the terrible homesickness I had felt on leaving my family behind wasn't as severe now as it was a few months ago. I was starting to get comfortable in this life—maybe a little too comfortable.

"I'd offer for you to come stay with my family over the holiday," Ataf said sheepishly, "but we're all going back to Hammerfell. One of the benefits of being part of a shipping conglomerate is that the whole clan can get together every year."

"If Aventus says he's fine, then he's fine," opined Aia. "We don't need to be showering him with offers of holiday lodging if he doesn't want them."

"You only say that because you're stuck in Solitude for the holidays too," Ataf shot back, perhaps a little more sharply than he might have done a week ago. She sniffed loudly and chose not to rise to the bait.

"Is everyone ready for the final in Professor Gemane's class?" I asked, trying to change the subject.

"We should be asking you that," retorted Jorn, still in fine form. "You're the one who's been causing the most trouble for the professor about this assignment."

"I still think it's stupid," I said, "but I've got my arrangement ready."

It had taken most of my scant spare time over the last several weeks, but I had managed to put together a new arrangement of "The Age of Oppression" for Professor Gemane's class. It used the mandolin that Hecate had given me as a gift, an instrument that wasn't used by Skyrim's bards, and I had quickened the meter to make it a little less mournful. Hopefully that would be unique enough for Gemane's standards.

"That's good to hear," Illdi smiled. I smiled back; it was hard to stay annoyed when she was around. "We're all looking forward to hearing it."

"Speak for yourself," Jorn joked. "I'm scared witless at the idea of having to perform in front of all of you."

"We perform in front of one another every day, Jorn," Aia chided.

"No," he returned. "We practice in front of one another every day. This is an actual recital, with real grades on the line. Not to mention our pride as bards in training."

"You're making too big a deal of it," I assured him.

"Easy for you to say, Mister Natural Talent," Jorn said, gesturing at me with a soup spoon for emphasis. I shrugged; Professor Six-Fingers had said that I had a natural talent for music one day in class, and Jorn and Ataf hadn't let me hear the end of it for weeks. Honestly, I had kind of hoped they had forgotten about it by now.

"It'll be fine," I insisted. "You'll do great."

The whole class was silent as I finished my recital. I looked at my classmates, then at Professor Gemane. No one moved or said anything. I put my mandolin down gently, as though making any noise would shatter the silence.

"That was…" started Ataf, then he stopped as though searching for a good word. My face flushed; had it really been that bad?

"By the gods," muttered Aia, just loud enough that I could hear her. "Even Jorn was better than that."

"Master Aretino," Professor Gemane said as the class bell rang, "I would appreciate it if you could stay after class so that we could talk."

My face was burning now and I felt shaky. Sweet Mother, it really had been that bad.

"Good luck, buddy," Ataf said, patting me on the shoulder as he headed out to join the others. They all looked somewhat worried for me as they departed.

Once they were all gone, I looked at Professor Gemane again. I wondered if I could just kill him now before he said anything. I could always claim it was an accident. He had tripped over his desk and somehow broken his neck…

"Master Aretino," he said disapprovingly, breaking me out of my pleasant fantasy, "I am somewhat disappointed in your recital performance."

"Sir, I-" I started to say, but he stopped me with a wave of his hand.

"You understand that 'The Age of Oppression' is a wartime song, yes?" he asked. "It's supposed to have a certain degree of gravitas, of weight—not sound like a barnyard tarantella."

I didn't know if I could blush any more deeply than I already was, but I would have if I could.

"I was actually worried about something like this happening," he continued, "so it's not entirely unexpected." He stroked his thin mustache thoughtfully before going on. "Are you familiar with the concept of 'perfect pitch'?" he asked.

"We discussed it briefly in Professor Six-Fingers' class," I told him. "She said it was a rare musical talent."

"I'm not sure I would call it a 'talent,' personally," he demurred. He pulled a chair over to sit across from me. "The phenomenon is better called 'absolute pitch.' It's basically the ability to discern absolute relations in musical notes without the use of tuning instruments. I suspected you might have it months ago when I noticed that you always tuned your mandolin by ear, instead of using a pitch whistle or tuning fork."

"Isn't it a good thing?" I asked, somewhat surprised at how perceptive Professor Gemane was. He had always seemed like a self-absorbed prick in class, but I guess there must be a reason he was a teacher at an institution as exclusive as the Bards College.

"Sort of," he said vaguely. "It's one of the reasons I don't like it being called 'perfect' pitch. Too many positive connotations there, you see?" I nodded, even though I didn't really. Professor Gemane liked hearing himself talk, and we could be here all day if he didn't hurry it up. "People with absolute pitch can usually reproduce music they hear almost perfectly, even if they've only heard it once or twice. They're excellent at musical notation and transcription." He paused and fixed me intently with his gaze. "But they're also usually terrible at improvisation and arrangement. The notes don't sound 'right' to them. If you let someone with perfect pitch hear a song four different ways, they can reproduce it in all four—but ask them to make up their own fifth arrangement, and all you'll get is a mess."

"Like I just did?" I asked. He nodded, and I looked down at my feet. I wasn't used to failing at things.

"You've had good marks all semester," he said, "despite some disagreements during my lectures. Low marks on this project won't actually hurt you that much." I looked back at him hopefully. "However, a deficiency in arrangement could harm you in the long run. Because of that, I'm going to assign you a tutor to help you get on track."

"A tutor?" I asked dumbly. "You mean another student?"

"One of the upperclassmen, yes," Gemane confirmed. "Starting in the next term, you'll have a senior peer helping you with this subject, since you're clearly struggling a bit. It will go hand in hand with your class in musical arrangement and composition."

"Am I so much of a failure I need special help?" I asked.

"It would be normal to assign you a senior peer anyway with your second year, just to start giving you practical experience, so consider it an early start." He looked at my expression and chuckled. "Don't look so glum, boy. You've got a useful skill, if you can start making it work for you instead of against you."

"We're going to have so much fun, Aventus!" Jordis burbled happily when I stopped by Proudspire Manor. "New Life Festival is my favorite holiday!"

"I can see that," I said sourly.

"Don't be so glum," she said. "I'll decorate the house and bring in a yule log and-" She was interrupted by the sound of the front door bell ringing. We both looked at one another with mild surprise; I wasn't expecting anyone, and as far as I knew, Jordis never had guests.

"I'll get it," I said quickly, hopping to my feet before she could protest. Talking about the holidays was only making me more annoyed about my poor performance for Professor Gemane's final exam. More than that, I found that the more I thought about not spending New Life Day with my family, the more it bothered me. Why couldn't people quit trying to cheer me up?

When I opened the door, I was surprised to see Dagny waiting for me, her hair up in a neat bun on top of her head. I stared for a moment before she laughed.

"Are you going to invite us in?" she said.

"Us?" I repeated dumbly. As soon as I said it, her father stepped into view, a broad smile on his bearded face. "Jarl Balgruuf," I said with a slight bow, trying to remember my manners. "Please come in."

"Thank you," he said as he ushered Dagny inside and followed behind her. Jordis was hot on my heels, and she quickly took their cloaks.

"I'm afraid I don't have a lot of refreshments to offer," I apologized. "I'm hardly ever here at Proudspire. In fact, Jordis and I were just discussing picking up a few provisions for the winter break, since I'm going to be in Solitude over the holidays."

"That's precisely why I asked my daughter to bring me to you," Balgruuf rumbled, sinking into a chair near the fireplace. "She mentioned that the two of you were going to go shopping together tomorrow." Actually, I would mostly be carrying Dagny's things while she shopped, but I didn't correct him. "She mentioned that your mother wouldn't be coming into the city for the winter court."

"I'm afraid not, sir," I confirmed. "It's just too difficult to travel in from… our home." I tried very hard to not let people know that my "mother" was living in Dawnstar; if the Sanctuary there was ever exposed, it might bring up uncomfortable questions.

"I understand completely," he said, nodding. He stroked his beard a moment before speaking, as though something had just occurred to him. Dagny had trained me in tells enough at this point to realize that this was all practiced; Jarl Balgruuf was too good a politician for anything else. "Since you won't be able to spend the winter holiday with your real family, I was wondering if you would care to spend it with mine."

"Sir, I couldn't," I began to object. "I wouldn't dare impose."

"It's no imposition at all," he insisted, waving one hand as though to dismiss my concerns. "Having the Dragonborn's son in my home for New Life Day would be my honor." I smiled tightly; of course he would want me over because of the symbolism. He was too good a politician for anything else. "Moreover, I know that you and my daughter have gotten quite close lately. I would like the opportunity to spend more time with the young man she's chosen to focus her efforts on."

"Well…" I demurred. I looked over my shoulder to where Jordis was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. The distraught look on her face was heartbreaking to see. I knew it all too well; it was the look of someone who knew what it was like to get ditched. She wouldn't raise a fuss, of course. Like a dog that had been kicked one too many times, she didn't even have the spirit to fight anymore.

"On one condition," I said, which made Balgruuf raise an eyebrow at me. "I'll come as long as I can bring my housecarl along. It wouldn't be proper for me to visit a jarl's home without my second along."

He smiled at that. Asking to bring Jordis along wasn't just a kindness on my part. A housecarl's duty was to protect her master's interests at home and abroad, and it was an important and honored position among the nobility of Skyrim. Bringing her along to a holiday dinner would be a sign that I considered myself a Nord culturally. I didn't really, but it didn't hurt anything.

And it would make Jordis happy.

As soon as she realized what I had asked, she started smiling broadly again, but then looked over at Jarl Balgruuf to see what he would say. When he nodded, she rushed over and immediately hugged me.

"Oh, thank you! Thank you!" she blubbered, burying her face in my shoulder. I looked over at Dagny awkwardly as my housecarl wept all over my shirt. She only shrugged, putting a hand in front of her mouth to stifle giggles.

"Do I get a hug?" Balgruuf asked, standing up. Jordis either didn't catch the sarcasm in his voice or didn't care, and she immediately rushed over to embrace the jarl. He staggered under her impact and chuckled as she repeated her grateful protestations. She finally stepped back and sniffed, wiping at her eyes.

"I just really like New Life Day," she finally said in a small voice.

We all laughed together then, even Jordis. It felt good.

It felt like family.

Saying goodbye to Ataf, Illdi, Aia and Jorn when the semester ended was harder than I thought it would be. Jorn and Ataf promised to bring back souvenirs when they came back to school, to everyone's amusement, and for the first time I heard that Illdi would be staying with Aia's family over the holiday. I wondered if it meant anything more than just Illdi not wanting to travel, but finally decided that it was none of my business either way.

Once they were all gone, and I had put my last possessions on a wagon bound for Proudspire, I took a few minutes to wander around the grounds before the locked the gates for the winter. Dark was coming on early, and snow was falling gently from the sky. It was sunset on the solstice, the darkest night of the year.

Solitude was a beautiful city, even in the dead of winter, and I found that I had started to become fond of the place. I realized that I hadn't just gone out sightseeing since I first arrived. Instead of walking straight back to Proudspire Manor, I let my feet carry me through the streets of the city.

As night fell and the weather worsened, I watched the torches and lanterns outside business light up, one by one. It wasn't as many as it might have been on some other day of the year. I suppose that most people wanted to get home early on such a cold, dreary night. Still, I felt more at home in the dark than most people. I saw the night patrol start their rounds, torches glittering on helms as they watched over the city. I didn't envy them their duty on a night like this; I could always just go home if it got too cold, but they didn't have the same option.

I briefly considered stopping at the Winking Skeever for a drink but kept on going. The prospect of running into Nelkir was ultimately what decided for me. I was still mad at him for the dirty trick he had pulled on me, and I wasn't ready to forgive him yet. The Skeever was one of his favorite watering holes, and even the off chance of bumping into him dampened my enthusiasm for revelry. I figured that I should probably start working myself up to it, if I was going to spend New Life Day with Balgruuf's family.

Being invited into Jarl Balgruuf's home was a real honor, and one that denying would have sent a message I didn't mean to send. Diana Dragonborn had clearly come out in favor of the Empire in the civil war, and anything I could do to bolster that connection was a positive thing as far as I was concerned. On the other hand, it wouldn't send a good message if I wound up getting into a fistfight with Jarl Balgruuf's youngest son over the dinner table on New Life Day.

My meandering and introspection was broken by a distant sound. My ears perked up, trying to listen for the sound to be repeated. I might have gone soft in the months I had been living in the capital, but I could have sworn that it was…

"Help me!" came the voice again. A woman's voice. "Please!"

I could still tell a scream for help when I heard one. Gods knew that I had caused enough of them.

I turned in the direction of the panicked shouting and took off at top speed. Part of me—the part that had been shaped by Cicero and Nazir and Meena—said that it was none of my business, that I should ignore it and not get close enough to get dragged in. The other part of me—the part that remembered Hecate calling me a good man with a good heart—pushed me ever faster toward the sound.

I ducked through alleyways and side streets, following the blood-curdling cries until they cut off suddenly. I was going to be too late, and part of me had known that from the moment I started running. I didn't stop, though. If someone was killing women in this city—in my city—then they were going to pay dearly for it.

As I came to the short, dead-end alley that I was sure was the source of the cries I reached for a weapon, only to realize that I had packed everything off in the hidden compartment of my traveling chest, since I had originally intended to just head straight back to Proudspire. I cursed myself for a stupid, rank amateur—but I didn't stop moving forward.

The weather had turned blustery while I was running, snow and freezing rain streaming from the sky. It killed my visibility, so I didn't see what I was looking for until I was almost on top of it. Up ahead, at the end of the alley, I could see a figure hunched over. Part of me hoped that it was the victim, somehow escaped from her attacker and taking a breather, but the sounds I could hear over the wind and rain killed any hopes I might have had all too quickly.

It was the sawing I heard first, the cutting of flesh and the snapping of bones. A man was hunched over a corpse in the slush, cutting through her ribs with a knife. Her head lolled on the ground, her dead eyes staring in my direction, frost already forming on her eyelashes. I was surprised to find that I could still feel horror at seeing a corpse, but it was a dull, distant thing.

More than anything else, I was critical of the killer's sloppy knife work, his obviously amateur strokes as he tried to butcher his kill. The woman looked like she had been dead when he began his grisly task, which was a small mercy. Her stomach was laid open as though she had been disemboweled with a powerful cut, possibly from a large sword. It had been sharp, whatever it was; the single strike had not just split the skin but actually cut through her intestines almost to her spine. She looked like she had fallen on her face after being killed, then flipped onto her back so her killer could…

What was he doing?

I felt my blood chill as he finished cracking her ribs and began to work inside her chest with a gloved hand. He was trying to take her heart. Human hearts were useful in a number of dark rituals—including the Black Sacrament. Whatever he was doing, I wasn't interested in letting him take his prize on top of the woman's life.

I took a runner's stance then made a dash toward him, kicking the knife from his head as he looked up. I shouted a powerful battle cry, muffled by the scarf I was wearing, then slammed my fist right into his face.

Pain shot up my arm like I had punched a steel drum, and I stumbled away from him with a cry of pain. The killer dropped back away from the woman's body, sent reeling by the power of my strike, but he quickly rolled to his feet. A surprise shot like the one I gave him should have broken his nose or jaw, but he didn't look like he was even bruised. On the other hand, I was worried that I might have broken a finger, or maybe my wrist.

The killer took a broad fighting stance, and one of his hands crept up above his shoulder as he looked up at me. His face made me take a step back. At first, I thought I was looking at a daedra of some kind before I realized that he was wearing a mask—a steel mask, carved in the semblance of a grinning, horned demon. I could see the hilt of a sword sticking up over his shoulder, a leather-covered grip above a round hilt-guard of a sort I had never seen before. Worse than that, as he reached for it, the hilt seemed to have a faint red glow.

He had an enchanted blade. That explained how someone as sloppy as he seemed to be with a knife had killed a woman with a single, unnaturally deep cut. I couldn't let him get that weapon free of its scabbard. If he did, I would be at a severe disadvantage—probably a fatal one.

I charged the demon-masked killer with a powerful shout, hoping to catch him off-guard. He surprised me by dropping low and lashing out with a side kick, catching me in the ankle. I felt my feet slip in the slush and I tumbled ass over teakettle into something warm and sticky. I realized that I had fallen into the dead woman's guts and quickly sat up, trying to get my bearings.

Rather than standing his ground and fighting, the demon-masked killer had turned tail and run. He ducked down a narrow side passage—I couldn't call it even an alley—that I hadn't seen when I came this way. I pulled myself to my feet, realizing that I was covered from head to waist in blood and gore. I started stripping off my bloody things as I ran after him, then realized that there was no way I could fit in behind him; the gap between the buildings was too narrow, and my shoulders and chest were just too broad for me to squeeze in.

I cursed under my breath and turned away, hoping to rook around the buildings and catch him on the other side before he got away. Someone was standing in the mouth of the alley by the time I got oriented. Did the demon-masked killed have an accomplice?

I realized my error when I caught sight of the torch the man was holding. He stepped forward a short way, then pulled his sword free of its scabbard as he saw me—standing over a disemboweled woman.

"Murder!" screamed the guardsman. "There's been a murder!"

That's when things got complicated.

…to be continued…


	10. Demons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus faces his own inner demons in the wake of his encounter with the masked killer. The youngest member of the Dark Brotherhood must deal with unpleasant questions about his life and that of his enemy. Are he and Demon Mask really so different?

Chapter 10: Demons

 

Sometimes, in these recollections of my life as a member of the Dark Brotherhood, I find that I jump around from moment to moment. I rarely think of things in the correct order, so I rarely tell them in the correct order. Perhaps many of my troubles have stemmed from the fact that I have a hard time putting my life in order—not just telling things in the right way, but actually in living them the right way.

It certainly felt like that as I was running through a white-out blizzard in the middle of the night, being chased by angry city guards for a murder I hadn't committed. I found it hard to be angry at them, though. After all, saying that I hadn't committed this particular murder was hardly comforting, given that I had committed many others. While I thought that all of them—save one—had been righteous acts of vengeance, I was fairly certain that argument wouldn't save me from a headsman's axe.

Or would they hang me? Was beheading just for noblemen? Really, I should have paid more attention to this sort of thing back when Cicero and Meena were training me, but no assassin ever expects to get caught. Bare minimum, we don't expect to get taken alive. The only assassin I knew of that had been captured and held for trial was Garnag, and they hadn't realized he was with the Brotherhood instead of just a common murderer. If they had, he would have been put to death right away instead of languishing in a cell for a decade.

By Sithis, I couldn't decide what was worse: being killed as an assassin, or being jailed for the rest of my life.

I realized that I was panicking—exactly what Hecate had always told me not to do in these situations. It wasn't something I was used to feeling. Normally, I was the hunter, not the hunted. I forced myself to stop in an alleyway to catch my breath. I was cold and tired and my mind was racing ahead of my body. I couldn't assume I was going to be caught; I had stayed ahead of the guard long enough that their catching up to me was unlikely.

As my breathing slowed and my heart stopped pounding quite so hard in my ears, I found that I couldn't hear the guards at all anymore. I had gotten far enough away that I was out of their search area. I breathed a sigh of relief that quickly turned into my teeth chattering together at high speed. My fingertips felt numb, even with the gloves I had stolen from the guard I had beaten up, and my lungs ached from sucking down so much freezing, damp air. My right wrist ached from the blow I had given the person in the demon mask; I was slightly worried that I might have broken it.

I might have been clear of the guards, but if I didn't get indoors soon, I was going to freeze to death. I wasn't a Nord, despite my classmates' occasional musings otherwise. My ancestors had come from far more gentle climes than frigid Skyrim, so I didn't possess the same resistance to freezing weather as the natives. At times like this, I genuinely regretted it.

Still, I had to balance my survival with not getting seen. I might be outside the patrol area, but a random guard wandering by would almost certainly wonder why I was wandering the streets in the middle of the night without a cloak or coat on. If they got close enough to see my face that would be too many questions that I didn't have answers for. Even if they didn't catch me close to the murder, they might decide to put two and two together and arrest me anyway. Stealth had to come before warmth.

It seemed to take forever to creep my way back to Proudspire Manor through the back alleys and side streets of Solitude. By the time I arrived, my shoulders and head were caked in frost and snow. My aching wrist had swollen up inside my stolen gloves and was throbbing in pain with every beat of my heart. My tailbone smarted from where Demon Mask had knocked me on my ass, and my ankle stung from where he had kicked me.

As I thought about the fight, tried to piece together everything I had done wrong—and the list was a long one—I thought about Demon Mask's unarmed abilities. He was sloppy with weapons, that was obvious in his knife work and his clumsy but powerful sword blows. I couldn't deny that he was a better unarmed combatant than I was. Fighting unarmed wasn't my strong suit, unfortunately; I was much better with weapons, especially blunt ones.

Nazir had told me to start building myself up for unarmed combat before I left Sanctuary and I had brushed it off. I simply hadn't been able to see the value in knowing how to fight without weapons. After all, it wasn't like I planned on beating anyone to death with my bare hands on contract; when I was on the job, I never had less than three weapons on me, and usually a lot more. I cursed myself a fool for not listening to Nazir. I promised myself that if I survived the night, I was going to start working on my unarmed training right away.

But first, I had to survive the night.

"Is someone there?" Jordis called out, her voice thin and reedy with worry. I could see the light of her lantern as she came up the hallway from her room. The point of her sword came around the corner first; I was just glad she hadn't attacked first and asked questions later.

"It's me," I called back as she came into view, wearing only a knee-length sleeping gown. I started to say something else, but doubled over in a horrible coughing fit before I could get the words out. My vision went red, then grey, before I could stop long enough to get a breath in.

"By the Eight," Jordis said as she dropped her sword and grabbed my shoulders. "Oh, Aventus! You're freezing! What happened?"

"I was robbed," I lied, hoping that the coughing and shivering would cover up how bad I felt about lying to Jordis. She wasn't very bright, but she had been a good friend to me these last few months. "After I left the college, I went to grab a drink before I came home. Someone hit me on the back of the head, knocked me out. They took my cloak and scarf. I woke up covered in snow. Fortunately, I wasn't carrying much coin on me…"

"Don't worry about your coin," Jordis chided as she grabbed my hands and started rubbing them between her own. "You could have died out in this weather without proper clothing." She looked me up and down. "Maybe they thought you were a Nord. Some of my cousins would think knocking someone out and leaving them in a snowbank was hilarious."

"I don't know," I croaked, my voice cutting out as I coughed harshly again.

"We have to get you warmed up," Jordis said, her face worried and her voice wavering. "Can you walk?"

"I got home, didn't I?" She laughed at that, but only a short, terse bark of laughter. She must have been really worried about me. Sweet Mother, I must have looked worse than I felt—and I felt like I was on death's door.

Jordis half-dragged, half-carried me up the stairs from Proudspire's back entrance. Pavot was waiting at the top of the stairs, whining and dancing back and forth in a way I had never seen before. Jordis shooed him off, but he didn't go far; he padded ahead of us to my room and put his paws on the footboard of my bed. Could he be worried about me?

My thoughts were muddy as Jordis stripped me to my smallclothes and tossed me under the blankets. I tried protesting, even pushing her away, but she was either way stronger than she looked or I had suddenly become very weak. I suspect that it was actually a combination of the two; Jordis was a housecarl after all, trained in swordplay and the wearing of heavy armor, and all of my strength had fled with the cold. She set to building a fire with quick, sure movements, but from the bed I was sure that her hands were shaking.

Once the fire was blazing, Jordis came back to check on me. She put a hand against my forehead, and in my half-frozen state it felt like a burning coal.

"The fire's not going to be enough," she muttered.

"Put Pavot in the bed with me," I muttered between coughs. "His body heat will keep me warm."

"I'm afraid he'll suffocate you," she retorted. "He's as big as you are, and you're too weak to push him off if he crawls on top of you."

She paused a moment, thinking it over in her unreadable fashion, then began pulling off her nightgown.

"Wait!" I protested as loudly as I could manage. "What are you doing?"

"You need body heat or you're going to die of hypothermia," she said calmly. "Pavot will suffocate you if he falls asleep and rolls over on you. So it has to be me." She covered her chest with one arm as she dropped the nightgown to the floor. "It's not like you're in any position to take advantage of me—and even if you were, I can take care of myself."

"But-" I started to protest, and then she started to pull her arm away from her breasts. I had seen naked women before, but I closed my eyes anyway. There was something about Jordis that made the idea of looking at her nude body feel wrong. She just seemed so damned innocent and guileless.

I opened my eyes again when I felt the blankets lift up and her warm body slide in beside mine. I looked toward her as she pressed herself against me, her eyes locking with mine. She wrapped her arms around me and pulled me in close.

"Don't be embarrassed," she said, even though she was blushing too. "It's just for a while, until the room warms up." She smiled, trying to reassure me. I felt extremely uncomfortable with this arrangement; at least I was too cold for the pleasant sensation of a woman pressed up against me to cause any reactions. I would have died of shame if I had gotten an erection from her closeness.

"Jordis…" I began, but started coughing. I tried to turn my head so that I wasn't coughing right into her face. She only pulled me closer and tucked my chin against her shoulder, letting my coughing and wheezing go past the side of her head.

"Aventus," she said gently once it had passed, "I think you got something gross in my hair."

I couldn't help it. I started laughing my head off then, even though it hurt to breathe. The coughing fit came back halfway through, but I kept laughing even as I was hacking. Even Jordis giggled along, though I could tell that she was still worried.

Wrapped in her warm, gentle embrace, I finally fell asleep sometime before dawn.

I remember nightmares.

I remember Rolff Stone-Fist, blood pouring down his chest from clumsy knife-wounds in his neck. He laughed at me, and with each laugh a fresh gout of crimson sprayed from the holes in his throat.

"You sent me to the Void, boy," he burbled, "and I'll be waiting for you when you get there."

"Me too, Aventus," crooned Grelod the Kind, slithering up out of the darkness with a knife-hilt sticking out of her chest. She crawled on her hands and knees, gore dripping from her mouth. "Was it worth killing me? Knowing you're going to be damned for it?"

"I didn't kill you!" I protested, holding up my hands to ward off the specters of my past. Even as I did, though, I could see my hands were covered in blood—so much blood.

"What about me?" asked a thin, reedy voice from the darkness. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn't look away. The red-haired youth that came shambling from the black was not much older than me, more a boy than a man. A knife was lodged in his neck, and he struggled to speak around it. "You murdered me, Aventus."

"I made peace with that, Vigurl," I told him, backing away slowly. Even as I said it, I had a hard time believing it.

"Good for you," he growled, advancing on me. "I'm still dead."

As I backed away from the shades advancing on me, I bumped into something. I spun around, holding up my hands to ward off an attack, only to see a pretty young woman standing there. Her face was sad and her dress covered in blood. I didn't recognize her until she lifted up her hands—her own heart was cradled in them.

"I definitely didn't kill you," I insisted. "I tried to save you!"

"But you didn't save me," she retorted. "Isn't that the same thing in the end?" She began to squeeze the still-beating heart, crushing viscera and crimson from between her fingers. "And you'd have done it anyway if someone threw a septim at you first."

"I serve the Night Mother's vengeance!" I pleaded. I turned on the ghosts and screamed at them, shaking with shame and rage and righteousness. "None of you have any power over me! I know who I am!"

"Who are you then?" asked a voice that sounded hauntingly familiar, like an echo through water. I turned to face the questioner, my bravado fading as I saw the demon-masked killer step from the shadows. His enchanted blade was unsheathed and held casually in one hand, its blade resting on his shoulder like a bindle stick. "Do you even know?"

"Of course I do," I insisted. "I'm-"

His sudden lunge caught me by surprise, embedding the red-glowing blade in my heart with a single thrust. My words stopped in my throat as I choked on my own breath. I didn't feel any pain, only a spreading cold numbness. I had expected the blade to be hot from the color of the glow, but it was freezing cold.

"You're dead, Aventus Aretino," Demon Mask said, reaching up to grab his horrible visage with his free hand. Even before he pulled the mask away, I knew what I was going to see under it.

It was my own face, staring back at me.

I woke up with a start, my body aching but no longer freezing cold. In fact, I felt overly warm. I recognized the feeling from a few years back—a fever. I had stayed out in the cold too long then as well and almost died from it. I didn't feel quite as terrible as I had back then, though I felt far from well. I suppose a few years of good food, good living, and regular exercise went a long way. Still, spending most of a night in snow and freezing rain without a proper coat wasn't good for anyone.

Except maybe Nords, I guess. They didn't seem to care about it either way. The more I thought about it, I couldn't ever remember seeing a Nord sick with a cold or anything like it either…

I realized that my mind was wandering and shook my head to clear it. Probably a result of the fever and disorientation. I was pretty sure I was still in my own bed, but it felt smaller than I was used to. My right arm was pretty numb too, full of pins and needles as though I had slept on it wrong.

I looked to my right and froze like a deer catching sight of a hunter. Jordis was in bed with me, naked, and pinning my right arm, which had apparently wrapped around her shoulders at some point in the night. I stopped breathing as she shifted slightly, just enough to bring her naked torso back into full contact with mine. All conscious thought fled as the panic began to well back up in my chest.

It was long moments before I remembered that she had crawled into bed with me to keep me warm the night before. The panic subsided somewhat, taking with it the animal instinct to gnaw my arm off at the shoulder. She must have fallen asleep at some point, despite saying that she would only stay until the room was warmed up.

"Damn it, Jordis," I muttered at her peaceful, sleeping face. "Wake up."

She murmured in her sleep and shifted—moving closer to me and throwing an arm across my chest. I groaned and slapped my free hand across my eyes before reaching over and trying to shake her awake. All I managed to accomplish was making the blanket droop dangerously low. Jordis shifted again, scratching at her nose before dropping her arm across me again, only this time her hand was a lot closer to my waist.

Of course I would have a housecarl that slept like a log.

"Hello?" drifted up a voice from downstairs. I froze again, instinctively trying to become invisible in the face of an unknown intruder. Of course, I wouldn't be doing much blending with the shadows while lying in bed with a naked woman who was distressingly soft and curvy and why was I even thinking this way about Jordis? "Is anyone home? Your back door was hanging open."

Sweet Mother, could I not catch a break? I must have not latched it completely last night and Jordis was too worried about me to have checked it. Also, the voice was very familiar; my head was thick from fever but I could have sworn it was-

My eyes widened and I began to scrabble ineffectually at Jordis as I realized who was coming up the stairs. I couldn't let her catch me in bed with a naked woman. I shook my slumbering housecarl with all the force I could muster—which admittedly wasn't very much. Still, how could Jordis be so wary that she always caught me sneaking in at night but sleep so heavily that I couldn't slap her awake?

"Aventus," Dagny called again, "are you home?" I could hear her footsteps approaching closer as I became even more frantic to get free. "Jordis? Anyone?"

"Hmmm?" Jordis finally murmured. I didn't know if it was Dagny being in the house or my repeated attempts to shake her awake that finally got her to open her eyes, but she looked at me blearily. "Aventus? What are you doing in my bed?"

"You're in my bed, gods damn it," I whispered.

"Oh," she responded, still clearly not completely awake. "I suppose that makes sense. It's so comfortable…" She started to close her eyes again, nodding her head as though she were going to fall back asleep. I hissed at her again between my teeth—only to start coughing and hacking.

I turned my head away from her so that I wasn't coughing right into her face. The noise apparently was sharp enough to make her startle back awake again, and she rolled over to face me. When I turned to look at her, she was sitting up on one elbow, her strawberry blonde hair falling into her face as she looked at me with worry. I had always thought that Jordis was pretty—maybe not as beautiful as her cousin, Jarl Elisif the Fair, but pretty nonetheless.

At that moment, caught in the wan sunlight of the early morning and staring at me with compassionate eyes, she was breathtaking. It wasn't just my actual inability to take whole breaths either. She was absolutely gorgeous. I couldn't help staring for a moment before doubling over again with another coughing fit.

"Hello?" Dagny called again, from the hallway this time. "I can hear someone cough-"

She came around the corner into the doorway just then, stopping in mid-sentence. She was wearing a plain winter dress, blue and white, and her hair was up in a bun wrapped in a scarf. She was holding a wicker basket in one hand; had she been picking snowberries? Her eyes widened slightly at the sight of Jordis and me in bed together, then her expression went flat. I had seen that look on her face before in court; it was the blank face she put on when dealing with unpleasantness.

"Dagny," I pleaded, "it's not what it-" I couldn't finish the sentence for another coughing fit, doubling up on myself as pain spasms tore through my diaphragm.

Dagny calmly sat her basket down on my dresser and pulled her gloves off, tossing them down beside it. She came across the room like a stalking cat, her facial expression never changing. As she reached out for me, I couldn't help flinching from the slap I was expecting. I was shocked when she laid her cool, smooth hand on my forehead. I groaned with the wonderful feeling before coughing feebly again.

"Not what it looks like?" she asked, raising up one eyebrow in a quirk. "It looks like you've got a fever and a wracking cough, and your housecarl was keeping you warm. I'd guess you came in last night with hypothermia and she saved your stupid, short-sighted, self-centered life. Is that about right?"

I could only nod, my eyes widening. Dagny sat down on the bed and leaned in to wrap her arms around me.

"Aventus," she asked, "do I look like the sort of person who makes judgments based on appearances?"

"I-"

"Don't answer that," she interrupted, leaning away. "It was a rhetorical question." She looked over at Jordis, who was sitting up now, holding the blanket against her bare chest with one hand. "Jordis, dear, go get dressed and bring cold cloths. Now that the hypothermia has passed, we have to control the fever."

Jordis nodded and stood up, awkwardly dragging one of the sheets along with her to act as a makeshift dress while she walked back to her own room.

"And Jordis?" Dagny said without looking back at her. "You don't have to be naked for heat transfer in cases of hypothermia. You just have to get the victim out of their cold clothes. The idea you have to have skin contact is a myth. Just for future reference."

I could swear that Jordis turned redder than her hair as she scurried out of the room, looking for clothes.

About an hour later, my room had become an efficient if makeshift hospital, catering to a patient body of one. Jordis was dressed in heavy winter layers as she had to keep running in and out of the house to get ice and snow for Dagny, who changed out my cold compresses every few minutes. I also think that Jordis was just embarrassed about the whole thing and wanted to be as covered up as possible around Dagny.

Once my fever had come a little bit under control, Dagny gave Jordis a short list of herbs to pick up from the local apothecary and then sent her out.

"I hope you don't mind me ordering your housecarl around," she said once Jordis was gone.

"I just hope she doesn't mind," I said, my voice raspy. "I don't give Jordis a lot of orders. She's more like a big sister to me than a servant." As I said it out loud, I was somewhat surprised to realize that I really meant it; in the last few months, Jordis had been a good friend to me and I had gotten more attached to her than I had expected to.

"I feel kind of the same way about Irileth, honestly," she replied, patting my forehead with a cool, damp cloth. "When I was little, I would call her 'auntie' all the time. Housecarls might start as servants, but the good ones are family too."

"I'm not used to having that," I admitted.

"What?" she asked. "Servants or family?"

"Neither," I responded. "My mother—my real mother, I mean—died when I was nine or ten. She was the only family I knew, and she… worked a lot, so I hardly ever saw her. I was sent to an orphanage after she died. Diana only adopted me a few years ago, so I'm still getting used to having a real family." I coughed weakly and Dangy leaned in to wipe at my mouth with the cloth.

"I figured you were from a poor family," she said. Her tone made it sound like she wasn't trying to be judgmental, but I still felt like a scrawny, dirt-covered orphan when she said it. "Your manners were terrible when we met."

"How are they now, princess?" I asked her.

"Better," she replied magnanimously. "Far from perfect, but better."

"I'm sorry I couldn't be some rich prince for you," I groused, turning away from her.

"Don't be sullen," Dagny scolded, touching my chin. "It's unbecoming." She leaned down and kissed the corner of my mouth. Her lips were cool and soothing against my face, but the place they touched tingled and warmed when she pulled away.

"Don't kiss me," I told her. "You'll get sick."

"Pneumonia is only contagious if you're already weak," she responded immediately, then leaned in and kissed me again. I was too weak to protest so I just did my best to enjoy it. Honestly, enjoying Dagny kissing me wasn't hard.

"How do you know so much about healing?" I asked when she finally pulled away.

"Almost every Nord woman needs to learn about herbs and curing sickness," she said. "It's considered a standard part of our education. Unless we decide to become warriors, of course—and it's still useful even then." She paused, looking down at her hands. "My mother was supposed to be really good at it. She died when I was very little, though. I don't remember her at all, though Frothar says he does a bit."

"I'm sorry," I said, reaching out to take her hand.

"At least you knew your mother," she said with a sad smile. "I wish I could have."

"What about Nelkir's mother?" I asked. "Did you know her?"

Dagny's smile faded and she shook her head.

"I never met her," she replied after a long pause. "She and Father weren't married. I think he was lonely after Mother died, so he starting seeing someone. He never talks about her. If it hadn't been for Nelkir being so nosy about it, I'm not sure he would have even told us that that we didn't all have the same mother."

"Does it ever bother you?" I asked, genuinely curious. My only siblings were adopted, so I didn't have the same sense of family that most people did.

"That Nelkir has a different mother?" she asked. I nodded and she continued, "No, not at all. I know it bothers Nelkir sometimes, though. He says things like we're not really related, and how do we know Balgruuf is even really his father, things like that." She sighed and shook her head. "He can be so difficult sometimes, but I love him anyway. I just wish he could go back to being the sweet little boy he was before we left Whiterun."

"You'll go back someday," I promised, squeezing her hand. "Diana will..."

"Will what?" she asked, locking eyes with me. "She's refused to fight, even if she claims to be on our side. My father is worrying himself sick about it. He's constantly scheming to build up the forces to take back our home, even though General Tullius refuses to help. Why won't your mother fight for us?"

"I don't know," I admitted. Hecate's refusal to take the field against Ulfric Stormcloak was a point of contention between us; I honestly didn't know why she hadn't just snuck into his palace and slit his throat already. "I think it has something to do with the False Dragonborn."

"You mean Lydia," Dagny responded flatly.

"She was Diana's—my mother's—housecarl," I pointed out. "I don't know what happened between them, but I know it wasn't pleasant. I think my mother still regrets whatever it was. They were close at one point—best friends."

"Housecarls can become like family," Dagny allowed. "It's a little harder for Father, though."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because Lydia isn't just 'like' family for us," she said. "She is family." I sat up in surprise, looking at Dagny with wide eyes. "She's my cousin. The daughter of my father's younger brother. Lydia was like a big sister to me growing up."

"I'm so sorry," I said. "I didn't know."

"No reason for you to," Dagny responded. "Most of the people in court know, of course, but they're far too well-mannered to bring up the fact that Jarl Balgruuf's own niece is the lieutenant of the man that killed his king. Everyone has relatives on both sides of the war, after all. It's hard not to in a civil war."

"You'll see Whiterun again someday," I promised. "I'll convince Diana somehow."

"I hope you can, Aventus," she said gently. "Don't tell my brothers, but I miss home too. I love Solitude—the fashions, the people…"

"The food?" I teased, drawing a laugh from her.

"At least you can get a decent sweetroll here," she allowed. "But Whiterun will always be home."

"I was there a few months back," I said in a sudden and unexpected burst of honesty.

"What?" she said in surprise. "How?"

"You can't tell your father about this," I insisted. When she nodded, I paused, thinking about how to tell her something comforting without revealing too much of the real circumstances of my visit. "Diana has… allies. Some of her friends move around in Stormcloak territory and keep an eye on things. I begged her to go with them once, and she allowed it."

"The Dragonborn has her own network of spies?" Dagny asked, her eyes wide and her face turning up in a broad smile. "Why hasn't she passed on any of the information to the Imperial forces?"

"Her… friends… aren't very many in number," I said. "If she started using that information, the Stormcloaks would figure it out pretty fast—and then they'd all be exposed to danger. She can't afford to exploit her sources until it's time to push back."

"Do you think it'll happen soon?" Dagny asked. Her face was so sincere, so hopeful for a change, that I couldn't bear the idea of disappointing her.

"I don't know," I said truthfully. "But I know that there are preparations underway. The Empire can still win this. The Stormcloaks haven't won yet."

Dagny threw her arms around me and began to shake slightly. I thought she might be crying, but I didn't want to ask; it would be rude, after all, and Dagny had taught me at least a little about manners. After a little while, she pulled away from me and leaned back. If she had been crying, I couldn't tell at all; her face was perfectly composed again.

"Can you tell me what Whiterun was like when you were there?" she asked very politely. I nodded and pulled myself up into a sitting position. As the blanket slipped off my bare chest, I suddenly realized that I had been naked this whole time—under a blanket, but still naked.

"Um," I muttered. "Can I have a minute to get dressed first?"

"I don't see why you should bother," Dagny said, leaning in to kiss me again. "I'm not offended." I wasn't sure if it was the fever or I was blushing, but my face felt hot and flushed at her words.

"I'm a little embarrassed," I admitted.

"Don't be," she responded. "You're sick and it's my job to take care of you."

"Your job?" I asked dumbly.

"Well, if we're going to be dating, then I guess we're supposed to take care of each other," she responded. "And you have a responsibility to take care of yourself too. You can't worry me like this from now on—I'll get wrinkles."

"I'll do my best," I told her, leaning up to kiss her. This time, I didn't feel embarrassed at all when the blanket slid down to my hips.

When we finally broke apart, she reached down and pulled the blanket up a little bit to make me slightly more decent. I was pleased to see that she was blushing a bit herself. It was nice to see her "ice princess" façade cracking, even a little bit.

"Now," she said in her best commanding voice, "tell me about Whiterun."

"Well, I grew up in Windhelm," I started. "I only tell you this so that you'll know what I mean when I say that the Stormcloaks try to turn every place into Windhelm all over again. But they haven't broken Whiterun's spirit…"

While my cough hadn't gone away completely, and I had to stop every few minutes for water or to catch my breath, I spent the next several hours just telling Dagny every detail I could remember from my brief trip to Whiterun a few months back. She had a faint, distant smile, as though she were visiting home again in her own mind, even if only for a little while.

Still, despite my happiness, I couldn't help feeling haunted by the night before. Demon Mask was still very much in my thoughts, and the awful fever dreams I'd had about him. In my nightmare, I had seen my own face under that awful mask. What did it mean? Did I think that the two of us might not be that different?

If I reported this to the Dark Brotherhood, I knew what their response would be. They would try to recruit him, just like they had with the Butcher in Windhelm. That had gone disastrously—almost ending with Hecate dead—but she would try the same thing again if I told her about another killer here. The Brotherhood had given her a new lease on life, and she couldn't help herself from offering the same second chance to others—whether they deserved it or not.

No, I had to handle this on my own, without the Brotherhood.

I might not have to do it alone, though…

…to be continued…


	11. Winter Chill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus recovers from his illness and becomes closer to the women in his life while debating his place in the world.

Chapter 11: Winter Chill

 

My recovery from hypothermia and pneumonia was easier than my childhood illnesses had been, but it still wasn't pleasant. I spent the next week as little more than an invalid with Jordis and Dagny taking turns watching me. But Jordis had to sleep sometimes and Dagny wasn't always around, so the enforced inactivity started to take its toll on me around the third day.

Fortunately for my sanity, I had most of my books in Proudspire Manor. I had enjoyed reading before I came to Solitude, but reading for pleasure was something that I had fallen out of the habit of doing ever since beginning my lessons at the Bards College. With nowhere to go and a pair of women who were fairly insistent that I recuperate fully before becoming mobile again, it was good to have a sedentary hobby to fall back on.

It felt like it had been forever since I had read Night Falls on Sentinel or The Black Arrow, but it couldn't have been more than a year. Honestly, it hadn't even been that long since I learned how to read, now that I thought about it. Gaining my literacy was the one good thing that came out of my time at Honorhall Orphanage.

Well, that and Grelod the Kind meeting a painful end.

While I had my books, it was company I craved most. I had always been afraid of being lonely. Growing up with just my mother and few friends, then the time I spent on my own after leaving Honorhall, had left me constantly looking for company and approval. I might have seemed like a loner to my friends at Bards College, but it was only because I wanted very badly to be back with my family.

Time passed differently in school, it seemed; sometimes I felt like I had already known Dagny and Jordis for years even though it had only been four or five months. It seemed strange now that I was back at Proudspire to not see Ataf every day, not to have a regimented schedule of classes to attend, not to take my meals at certain times. I had gotten used to life in school just as quickly as Nazir had predicted—and I couldn't deny that part of me enjoyed it.

Even with books and occasional company, I had plenty of time to think over the next week. I would often find my mind drifting back to what Ataf had told me a few weeks before—that I should hurry up and choose Dagny before I messed things up with her. More and more since then, I had begun to think that the choice I was supposed to be making wasn't between Dagny and Runa; after all, I didn't even know what Runa thought about me beyond liking to wind me up. No, the choice I needed to make was more basic than that.

The choice was between life in the Brotherhood and life outside it.

Going out and threatening Erikur with Runa had been fun, even thrilling. There was a part of me—a big part—that thought maybe we should have just killed him and been done with it. But my tendency to run toward trouble and make things worse had almost gotten me killed more than once, most recently when I nearly got my block knocked off by a psychopath in a daedra mask, nearly pinched by the city guard, and then suffered hypothermia during my narrow escape. Things like that can sour a person on the idea of looking for trouble.

I couldn't deny either that I really liked Dagny pampering me. I knew that I shouldn't get used to it; as soon as I could breathe normally again, it would be back to fending for myself and putting up with her snide remarks about my manners and upbringing. Still, it helped show that there were people outside the Brotherhood I could rely on, people who cared about me as a person and not because I was good at ending human lives. It was almost as intoxicating as mead.

At the same time, being stuck in a bed for a week reminded me how much I had come to relish the physical part of my training and work. I didn't feel right skipping my morning exercises for days on end. Beyond that, I knew that I enjoyed my job; killing in the Night Mother's name felt righteous. Even pushing around a pompous prick like Erikur had felt like doing the good work. And I couldn't deny that I was a little addicted to the thrills, even when they might cost me my life—especially then, maybe.

The truth was that my life in Solitude was a lie. If the people who thought they knew me found out what I really was—who I really was—they would all reject me in a heartbeat. By Sithis, half of them would probably try to turn me in! I couldn't bear the idea that Dagny might ever look at me like some kind of monster; even the thought of it made my chest hurt. Some of that might have been the pneumonia, but it still wasn't a pleasant notion.

I didn't dare ask Hecate if there was a precedent for leaving the Dark Brotherhood. What if it was some sort of taboo? Cicero was the closest thing I had to a father, and he would still gut me in a second if he thought I was disrespecting the Night Mother.

Even worse, what if there was a precedent? What if I could just walk away? Would I dare? Hecate had always been reluctant on bringing me into the Brotherhood anyway. She was radical enough of a Listener that even if there weren't a precedent, she might just allow it.

So around and around it went. There were plenty of arguments for and against both paths, and neither of them could be everything I wanted out of my life. In the end, after a week of recuperating and thinking about the problem long and deep, I did what I always did in situations like this one: I changed the subject and stopped thinking about it.

In retrospect, not making a choice while I had time to think on it was probably one of the stupidest things I had ever done—and that wasn't a short list by any means. A lot of the tragedies of the next year of my life could have probably have been avoided if I had just made up my mind then and there.

But I didn't. And many of the terrible things that came to me afterward are surely because of my indecision.

"Murders?" I asked Dagny, sitting in bed with my head propped up. Her usual daily dose of gossip just included what her friends were wearing or which thanes were sleeping with each other's spouses. Hearing sweet Dagny bring up something I was so intimately familiar with created an odd sort of dissonance in me.

"Don't tell Father I mentioned it," she responded, putting a bowl of broth down on the tray that straddled my lap. "I heard him talking to Irileth about it a few days ago. I wanted to ask if you getting robbed could be related, but I didn't want him to know that I was eavesdropping."

"I doubt it's related," I said quickly. "I don't think a cold-blooded killer would just beat me up and take my coin purse. If it was related, you'd probably be crying over my grave right now instead of bringing me soup."

"Don't even joke," Dagny replied sharply. "Irileth warned me that I shouldn't be out after dark by myself, but she wouldn't explain why. I think these murders might be the cause. Would you mind asking my father about it when you get a chance?"

"Me?" I asked in surprise. "Why do you think he would tell me about it and not you?"

"He's always trying to shield his 'precious children' from unpleasant news," Dagny sighed as she shook her head, her curly dark-blonde locks dancing around her chubby face. "It's why he wouldn't even let Frothar learn how to use a sword until he was fifteen. I think he'd talk to you about it, though. Having the Dragonborn's son show an interest in local events would light up his day, I think."

"We'll see," was what I told her.

Inwardly, I was grateful to hear about an opportunity to ask someone high-ranking about the man that had almost gotten me killed. I was also disturbed. Dagny had said "murders"—that meant there was more than the one I had witnessed. Since I hadn't heard anything about a serial killer loose in Solitude that meant the authorities were trying to keep it quiet. Things like this had a way of spreading, though. If I couldn't get Jarl Balgruuf to open up to me, I still had other avenues to find out what the word on the street was about the murders, if any.

Given how sloppy Demon Mask had seemed with the girl in the alley, I couldn't imagine that he had killed more than two or three people total. He was completely untrained when it came to things like weaponry and murder; a trained killer wouldn't have let the girl even get a chance to scream. He had only managed to slip away from me because of some fancy unarmed moves and being small enough that he could slip through an alley I couldn't fit into.

I nearly dropped my spoon and had to make my apologies to Dagny for still being weak and dizzy. It wasn't the sickness that had made me suddenly clumsy, though. It was a horrible thought.

The killer didn't necessarily have to be a man. I had been making an assumption more than anything else, but the killer being shorter than me and thinner could well indicate a woman. The mask had completely covered his—or her—face, and Demon Mask's armor was form-concealing enough that there had been no way to see any sign of his—or her—gender. Honestly, anyone could be a suspect.

Well, except Dagny. I was pretty sure she was too chubby to fit into Demon Mask's armor.

I resolved to myself that even though I would keep calling Demon Mask "he"—it was just easier for me—that I wouldn't dismiss any evidence or indications that might lead to a woman.

"Are you okay, Aventus?" Dagny asked me. "You seem distracted."

"Just thinking about what you told me," I admitted. "I can't imagine someone getting killed in a city as beautiful as Solitude."

"Well, we have a few deaths every year from brawls and robberies gone bad," she said sadly. "I think this is different, though. Father seems genuinely upset about the whole thing."

"I think you should listen to Irileth," I told her. "Don't go out after dark until this is taken care of. I couldn't stand it if something happened to you."

"That's sweet, Aventus," she said before taking my chin between her thumb and forefinger. She locked eyes with me and gave me a smile that was more razors than sweetrolls. "Sweet but stupid. Don't make the same mistake my father does. I'm not a helpless princess who needs someone to take care of her—I'm a Nord."

"I suppose I was fooled by you being so much shorter than me," I snarked, then immediately regretted it when she pinched my chin. "Ouch!"

"Everyone's always trying to watch out for me, keep me safe," she complained. "I can take care of myself."

"We all need someone to watch out for us sometimes," I told her, reaching out to lay my hands on her shoulders. "Just take it as a compliment that you have so many people who care about you."

Was I really saying this? Were these my words? They sounded an awful lot like someone else. I didn't know if I needed to thank Ataf the next time I saw him or pop him one in the nose.

"I'm grateful," she smiled. Our hands found each other, right before she pinched my chin again. "Now eat your soup before it gets too cold."

I sipped my broth while Dagny returned to lighter topics, half-listening and nodding in the right places. I was anxious to finish my recovery and get moving again. Every day I wasn't hunting down leads about Demon Mask was another day he was free to kill. I couldn't make contact with my resources—Brotherhood or otherwise—from a sickbed. Until I was up on my own two feet, I was out of the game.

I didn't intend to stay out for long.

It took me a week to get over my persistent cough. I probably could have been up and about two days sooner than that since the fever and chills had gone, taking the heavy, wet feeling in my lungs with them, but Dagny had insisted that I didn't start breathing cold air again until my cough was completely over. She said that "southerners" sometimes had bad reactions to the cold after pneumonia.

I didn't know whether I should believe her or not, but staying in bed for an extra couple of days was a small price to pay if it would keep her from wondering too deeply about why I was so anxious to get moving again.

The day I was ready to walk out of Proudspire Manor was a beautiful day—to me, if not to anyone else. The sky was overcast and the streets were filled with grey snow and sludge. Still, being on my own feet again felt amazing, even if I was still a little weak and dizzy after the whole ordeal. I told Jordis that I was going to take Pavot for a walk, and after promising her that I wouldn't push myself too hard, she finally agreed to let me go out.

It took me a while to dress myself. Fortunately, I had another good coat and cloak to replace the ones I had been required to dispose of before coming home. Being friends with Dagny had had the unintended positive side effect of dramatically increasing my wardrobe. When I got downstairs to the front entrance, I found Jordis there in full winter garb, kneeling in front of Pavot and rubbing his jowls while declaring that he was a good boy. For his part, Pavot was tolerating the whole thing with remarkable patience.

"Are you going out too?" I asked her.

"Of course I am, silly," she responded, standing up and turning to face me. "With you!"

I groaned softly before rubbing one gloved hand across my face and trying to salvage the situation.

"Jordis," I started, "it's not that I wouldn't appreciate the company-"

"Great!" she exclaimed. "It's settled then! We're going to have a nice walk together, and I can pick up some supplies while we're out. I haven't been able to properly go shopping all week, so we're just about out of everything…"

I sighed and took Pavot's leash. There was no way that I could argue with Jordis without it seeming suspicious, so I would just have to figure out some way to make contact without her noticing. Honestly, I liked Jordis but she wasn't the sharpest sword on the rack and I was trained in stealth and infiltration. Passing off a message without her catching me in the act would probably be easy as pie. The hard part would be getting her to the dead drop's location without her raising a fuss.

I leashed up Pavot and opened the door with a "you first" gesture to Jordis. I didn't normally keep my ice wolf on a leash while he was out with me, but he had finally started to understand that he needed to wear one while we were out with other people. Most of the folks who knew about Pavot thought that he was just a somewhat wolfy-looking dog rather than a full-grown, vicious ice wolf. To keep that illusion up, he needed a leash while we were out in public during the day and going further than the edge of the very nice upper-class neighborhood that Proudspire Manor was in.

Once we were outside, I didn't have a lot of time to worry about Jordis since it seemed like Pavot was dead set on dragging me off my feet. I knew that he hadn't been out much in the last week, so he must have been just an antsy as me to get out and get some exercise. Within a few minutes, I was even grateful to have Jordis along so that I could pass Pavot's leash off to her. Despite my insistence that I was ready to get back to business as usual, my muscles were aching and I was breathing hard no more than two blocks from Proudspire. I couldn't blame it all on Pavot's enthusiasm either; a week of severe illness takes more out of you than most people think.

Wandering around from one shop to another took up the next several hours. If we'd had to carry our own purchases back to Proudspire, I'm not certain that we could have managed it all; Jordis bought food and supplies like she was preparing for a siege. Fortunately, most of the shops in Solitude's market district were more than happy to have our purchases delivered this evening—for a small additional fee, naturally.

Every time Jordis bought something without haggling, I flinched a little bit. Honestly, it was more that I hated to see people spend money at all than that I thought anything was particularly overpriced. Growing up poor had left me with—let's call it an over-appreciation—for coin. I didn't like spending money; I just liked having money. Meena had always called me cheap, but I preferred to think that I just wasn't as much of a wastrel as most assassins. The majority of my brothers and sisters in the Dark Brotherhood threw away their money constantly on drink and whores and little pleasures. I rarely indulged in drink, never in prostitutes, and didn't have any hobbies beyond music and reading, both of which were inexpensive.

The fact that Hecate seemed to agree with my policy comforted me, since she was just as loathe to spend coin as I was—if not more so. There were tens of thousands of septims stuck under the floorboards of her old house in Whiterun; if the Stormcloaks ever bothered searching the place, they'd have enough cash to keep the war efforts going even without the silver mines at Markarth. Of course, we were both cheap even by Nazir's standards, and he was the Brotherhood's notoriously tight-fisted quartermaster.

As the day wore on, Jordis seemed to be just as fresh as ever while I was virtually gasping with exertion. She seemed cool and unaffected in her heavy armor and woolen winter clothes, even carrying the packages that we couldn't get delivered and letting Pavot half-drag her across the city. I felt a little jealous of her sheer endurance; whatever I might think of her intelligence, I couldn't deny her tenacity.

"Do you need to take a break?" Jordis asked me for what felt like the tenth time.

"I'm fine," I insisted, despite the fact that pushing the words out felt almost painful.

"Well, I need a break," she said with a cheerful smile. "I think a little sit-down, a quick bite to eat, and a drink would be very nice." She paused and scanned around, looking for a suitable place to stop.

"I know a place near here," I said quickly. "It's not exactly classy, but it's cheap and quick."

"I already know a place," she said without looking at me. "I'm just trying to figure out which direction it's in. I've lived in Solitude my whole life and I still get lost this far from the Blue Palace…"

Damn it all. Of course she already knew someplace she wanted to go. Just my luck I would never get to-

"It's called the Winking Skeever," Jordis continued, not noticing my frustration. "Have you ever been there?"

"Once or twice," I lied easily. It sometimes amazed me how casual I had become about lying to people I cared about. "It's over that way." I pointed the right direction to her, and Jordis' face lit up.

"Great!" she chirped. "It'll be good for us both to get off our feet for a while before we finish up and head home."

Jordis looked at me and smiled—but it was a slightly worried smile, one that didn't quite touch her eyes. I realized that she was lying about needing to take a break; she was just worried about me. I thought about objecting, even though it would mess up my own plans, but I finally decided that I would just accept the gesture for what it was. I couldn't help but feel a little guilty about using Jordis so blithely while she was so clearly concerned about my well-being.

We took it slow and steady on the way to the tavern, chatting amiably about my school work and the extra tutoring I would be getting when the new semester started. Jordis mostly listened to me as I talked and occasionally prompted me for more information about things. I got the distinct impression from her sparse responses when I asked her questions that it wasn't that she was unwilling to talk about herself so much as not having a lot to talk about.

Jordis spent most of her time guarding the home of a woman who was hardly ever in the city, and hardly spent any time talking with her unwanted housecarl when she was here. She had been away from her family and friends for most of the last year, taken out of the ebb and flow of court life to perform an honorable—if somewhat menial and symbolic—duty. She could have spent more time at the Blue Palace, I supposed, but she seemed to take her job very seriously. I had a lot of sympathy for her situation; I was just as isolated from my loved ones as she was, but at least I had school and new friends to keep me distracted.

Was Jordis lonely? I couldn't think of anything worse than that, and I quietly pledged to spend more time with her in the coming months. Bringing her along with me to Jarl Balgruuf's home for New Life Day was a good first step. No one should have to spend the holidays alone.

The Winking Skeever was just where I had left it the last time I had been there, drinking with Runa in the aftermath of my disastrous day out with Nelkir. I had thought about stopping in for a drink a few times since then, but I really hadn't wanted to run into Nelkir again. There was still a chance I would see him there, but I figured he wasn't enough of a jerk to start anything with me as long as Jordis was around.

The two of us made our way inside, and I sighed with pleasure as the warmth from the hearth struck me in a wave. I hadn't realized how cold I was until I was someplace warm. We both stretched and started pulling off our cloaks when the barkeep yelled at us.

"You can't bring that dog in here!" he shouted. "Tie that flea bag up outside!"

Pavot started to growl, and I again wondered if he actually understood what the man was saying or if he was just responding to the tone. Jordis started shifting around, trying to get her cloak back on without putting down our packages or letting go of Pavot's leash.

"It's okay," I told her, taking the lead from her hand. "I'll take Pavot outside while you grab a booth and drinks." She smiled and nodded, keeping her cloak balanced on one arm while shifting the packages between her hands. As I turned away and walked out, I heard a muttered "Oops!" and a series of crashes that let me know that Jordis had once again fallen on her ass. It shocked me that the woman could walk across a solid sheet of ice without slipping in the least, but could trip over her own feet on flat, dry wooden floors.

I winced with sympathy, but I was also a little relieved. If Jordis was busy collecting our things and getting herself upright, she wouldn't come looking for me if I took longer than I intended.

I quickly tied up Pavot to the hitching post outside the tavern, putting him well down from the single horse that was tethered up outside. I wasn't worried about Pavot attacking anyone's horse while he was left on his own as much as I was worried that his presence would make a horse panic. After scratching the ice wolf behind his ears, I walked around the corner into the alley next to the tavern. A small, narrow door was set into the building's wall at almost the alley's end, a back door into the kitchen and taproom for the staff to bring in shipments and take out garbage. Across the alley from that door was a garbage bin, overflowing as usual from the Skeever's leavings; to the right of that bin was a stone wall with a loose brick.

I walked down the alley, ready to put a hand to my trousers if anyone came out of the tavern; someone stumbling into the alley to urinate next to the bin was common enough around here that no one would think twice about it. I made sure to avoid the pile of yellowish snow and slush as I worked the loose brick out of its niche. As I expected, there was no message in the dead drop that Runa and I had arranged weeks ago. We hadn't had much of a reason to contact one another since we shook down Thane Erikur.

I pulled a scrawled note out of my pocket, all that I had been able to sneak off to do while Jordis was shopping, and shoved it into the niche, pushing the brick in on top of it. I had no idea how often Runa checked our message box, so I figured it could take days or even a week before I heard back from her. That wasn't as quick as I would like, but I didn't really have a better way of getting in touch with her.

Feeling accomplished that I had gotten my message passed without being caught, I strode out of the alley and quickly turned back into the Winking Skeever, patting Pavot along the way. Once I was inside, I hung up my cloak and started scanning the smoky tavern for a sight of my strawberry-blonde companion. I was a bit surprised to see her sitting at a booth in the back—but not alone. Another woman was sitting with her, though all I could see was long brown hair and-

Oh no. Sweet Mother, how unlucky could I be?

Jordis was laughing as I jogged up, one hand over her mouth as though she was trying to hold in the giggles from a particularly naughty joke. She took a long drink when I stopped at the table and looked up at me.

"Aventus!" she said happily. "I ordered us a couple of [[shepherd's pies]]. I hope that's okay." I nodded and maneuvered around to confirm what I already knew what true, keeping my face as straight as possible. Jordis noticed my stare, though, and gestured at her new friend. "I hope you don't mind Runa joining us. She saw us come in and said that she's an old friend of yours. I figured that would be all right."

"That's fine, Jordis," I said, looking down at the smiling, almost predatory face of Runa Fair-Shield. "Runa and I go back a long way."

"I think our food's up," Jordis said, pulling herself out of the booth. "You sit and rest while I get it." I nodded in agreement and settled myself into a seat across from Runa. As soon as Jordis was out of earshot, I leaned in to whisper at her.

"What are you doing?" I asked harshly.

"What do you mean?" she responded with mock innocence. "I'm just saying hello to an old friend. Normal people do that all the time, Aventus. Are you ashamed of me?" She leaned closer, her smile become even more razor-edged and slightly crazed. "I mean, the son of an important person can't be seen in public with a thief, right?"

"It's not that!" I objected.

"Does your mother know what you do?" she asked with a smile. I sighed inwardly with relief; Runa hadn't made a connection between Diana Dragonborn and the Dark Brotherhood, which was really what I had feared.

"No," I lied, "and she never will. Are we clear about that?" Runa nodded, no longer smiling. "Diana is a good woman and she was kind to take me in. I won't have that kindness repaid by any shame coming to her from me—regardless of what I've chosen to do with my life."

"I understand," Runa said grudgingly. "Still, it's got to be pretty sweet, right? Adopted by a rich, famous lady and trained by the best assassins in the world. Sounds incredible to me."

"It's not all it's cracked up to be sometimes," I said with absolute honesty. "And before you ask, Jordis doesn't know either. I'd take it as a kindness if you didn't mention either of our actual professions around her."

"Jordis is a hoot," she responded, smiling again. "She's too good to be your friend." Runa laughed and took a long pull from her ale. I relaxed; she would keep my secrets.

"I actually came out here to get in touch with you," I told her when she finished chugging her drink. "I left a message in our dead drop."

"Dead drop?" she asked, seemingly confused. After a moment, she frowned at me and set her mug down with a heavy thunk. "Aventus, I don't check that gods damned thing. If you want to get in touch with me, just leave a message with the bartender." I sighed deeply and ran a hand over my face, but we had to cut our conversation short because of Jordis coming back with the food and refills for our drinks.

"Who's hungry?" Jordis said with a tone so cheerful it made me want to hurl.

I could already tell this was going to be a fun meal.

A late lunch at the Winking Skeever turned into a long afternoon of drinks and tavern food. Runa and Jordis were actually really fun to hang out with, especially once Jordis had a couple of pints in her. Runa shared a few stories of some of the more legitimate things she had done in the last few years, mostly tavern brawls and one night stands turned bad in the dumbest ways.

"With a chicken?" Jordis asked with wide, unbelieving eyes. "No!"

"Swear to Talos!" Runa shouted. "And when I asked him about it—way more calmly than he deserved, mind you—all he was able to come up with was, 'I was just looking for an egg.'" The two woman burst out laughing, slapping their hands on the table as they did, and even I found myself chuckling along, though these ribald stories didn't usually tickle my funny bone.

"What happened to him?" I asked when they finally stopped laughing.

"I clocked him one, took the very traumatized chicken back to its coop, and ducked out," she said, trying to keep a straight face. "It wasn't like I could turn him in. I'd already been in a bar brawl where I wound up knocking the teeth out of a town guard's head, so the local law wasn't very fond of me." She took another pull from her mug before she continued. "Turned out I didn't have to. Someone saw him robbing a henhouse a few days later and called the guards on him. I don't know what they did with him, but the guards in Skyrim take crimes against chickens very seriously."

We all burst out laughing again and Jordis stood up to get more drinks, giggling as she walked away unsteadily. I looked to the windows and noticed that it was getting late; if I wanted Jordis to be able to get back to Proudspire on her own power, one more round should probably be the limit.

"What was it you wanted to find me for?" Runa asked. It was the first time in hours we had been alone together at the table, but I was surprised she still remembered.

"Someone's murdering women in Solitude," I said, all the laughter draining out of my voice like liquor from a holed cask. "I got a glimpse of him in the act. I need someone to ask around about the killings and find out what the city guard isn't telling us, what the people on the street know about it. You're way better at that sort of thing than me."

"You want to find him and recruit him?" she asked, her voice carefully neutral.

"I want to find him and put him in the ground," I responded. "That's why I'm asking you and not a Sibling."

"Would your superiors approve of you taking this on yourself?" Runa asked, apparently genuinely interested.

"Probably not," I admitted, "but I see things differently than they do. If someone's murdering innocent people in my city, I intend to stop them."

"Your city?" she mused. "That's awfully arrogant."

"Are you going to help me or not?" I pushed, keeping an eye on Jordis as she wandered back our way.

"All you had to do was ask," Runa said with a tight smile. "Every time I go out with you, I get into a fight. Good times."

"You're a strange girl," I muttered to her.

"You love it," she teased.

As Jordis returned with our last round of drinks, I smiled a bemused smile. She was right, after all. I did love it. I wasn't sure that I loved Runa—really, I wasn't sure I even knew what love was, other than the familial love I felt for the Dark Brotherhood—but I certainly loved the way she made me feel. Getting into trouble with Runa was like a drug; I'd only had it a couple of times, but I was already craving more. Sweet Mother help me, I was looking forward to putting on the colors and getting into a fight with her at my back instead of her trying to clean my clock.

By Oblivion, I was halfway looking forward to just fighting her again. With the way Runa thought about the world, I figured it was inevitable. Sooner or later, she would decide that I was looking at her funny and we'd be back to leaving bruises on each other and spitting blood in an alley somewhere. She was a good partner and a good opponent.

Could that be enough for a relationship? Would she even want one? Would I want one that turned violent at the drop of a hat?

It certainly seemed to work well enough for Hecate and Cicero after all…

…to be continued…


	12. Deep Freeze

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aventus celebrates New Life Day with Dagny and Jordis, but quickly finds himself out of place in the high-society world of Imperial Skyrim. The boy assassin makes some hard choices about his future.

Chapter 12: Deep Freeze

 

"Don't fidget so much," Dagny said as she fretted with her own hair. "You look like you have fleas or something."

"These clothes itch," I complained. "I'm not used to wool."

"You wear wool all the time," she pointed out, tucking a loose strand of hair back into place. It had been perfect when we left her house an hour before, but I suppose the jostling of a carriage had loosened it. At that, she was still doing better than I was.I felt sweaty, itchy, and like my hair was threatening to burst off my head and go flying away.

"Not dyed like this," I retorted. I gestured down at my new outfit. If was a garish, clashing three-tone tunic in purple and green with a few splashes of yellow for variety. "The dye itches."

"It does not," she snapped, looking at me with a frustrated expression. "You just don't want to wear what I picked out for you, and you're projecting."

"Maybe a little," I confessed. "This isn't the sort of thing I wear normally."

"Of course not," she sniffed, turning to look back at her hand mirror to work on her makeup. "You can't wear your usual clothes around people of importance."

I had no idea how she was doing something so precise in a moving carriage without looking like a clown. I looked back down at myself and sighed; she didn't need to look like a clown—I was already doing that effectively enough for the both of us.

"I still don't understand why I'm dressed like a jester." Honestly, Cicero's usual motley was far more subdued than the nonsense I was stuck in at the moment. "Don't the Altmer hate jesters?"

"But they love bright colors," she explained. "They prefer to dress like—how did Taarie put it?—like living tapestries. Of course, all the Altmer at Elenwen's Solarium will be part of the Thalmor, so they'll be stuck in those dreary black robes they wear on-duty. Still, it's best to dress the way your hosts prefer."

That part I got: You always wanted optimum camouflage when entering a hostile environment.

"This wasn't what I expected when I came over this morning," I told Dagny, touching her elbow lightly.

"Don't jostle me when I'm working," she said without looking at me. "And clearly you didn't know what to expect. That's why I made sure to have an extra holiday outfit for you, just in case." She glanced sidelong at me for a moment. "You're welcome, by the way."

"I'm just saying that a little forewarning would have been nice, is all." I turned to look out at the frosted Skyrim landscape beyond the carriage's narrow windows. Everywhere was snow and ice, and a thin, freezing drizzle was falling from the grey sky. I didn't envy our coachman on a day like this. Or Jordis, for that matter.

"What did you think he meant when my father invited you over for New Life Day?" she said with a hint of continuing annoyance in her voice.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Not this."

"I love New Life Day!" Jordis burbled as she danced around the living room of Proudspire Manor. I couldn't help but smile at her antics; it was almost like seeing Cicero again. But with fewer knives and mood swings.

"Me too," I told her, buttoning up my long coat. I was wearing one of my nicer outfits today—a maroon tunic and black trousers, topped with a fur-lined coat. It was in Solitude's colors, which I thought would be a nice message for Jarl Balgruuf, and it was something that Dagny had helped me pick out, which always made her happy.

Sometimes I wondered if I was getting too bogged down in the games that Dagny and her sort of people played. Instead of just enjoying my favorite holiday, I was busy "sending messages" and "dressing appropriately." It was sort of tiresome, but ultimately I'd had to conclude that if it made Dagny happy and made Jarl Balgruuf more comfortable with me, then it was worth it.

"You're not going to fight with Nelkir, are you?" Jordis suddenly asked me. I froze; I had never mentioned my falling out with Dagny's little brother to her.

"What do you mean?" I responded cautiously.

"It's just that every time Dagny mentions Nelkir, you tense up," she replied nonchalantly, trying to button on her own coat with mitten-covered hands. "Seems like you're angry at him for some reason."

"I'm not angry at Nelkir," I lied. Truthfully, I wasn't as mad at the little brat as I had been when he pulled his "prank" on me, but I certainly wasn't happy with him. Avoiding him for a few weeks was supposed to have given me some time to cool off, but all it had really done was turn my sharp anger into a dull one. I didn't want to punch his teeth in anymore, but I probably wouldn't take the time to put him out if someone set him on fire either.

"Mm-hmm," she replied, just as noncommittally. I reminded myself to keep a closer eye on Jordis. She might not be the sharpest sword on the rack, but she was way more observant than I had given her credit for. That could be trouble for me in the long run. I still had a year and a half of school left before I could return to the Dark Brotherhood, and a lot could go wrong in that amount of time.

On the other hand, if I didn't ever go back…

I shook myself out of that line of thought and walked over to Jordis, buttoning up her coat to distract myself. She muttered an embarrassed "thanks" before smiling broadly again and almost skipping to the door. I smiled too; her good cheer was infectious. My smile felt melancholy, though, almost brittle. New Life Day made me miss my family something terrible, and the guilt I felt at thinking about possibly leaving them forever only made it worse. All of this was so much simpler when I was home with Hecate and Cicero and the others. Nothing was simple here in Solitude, not even my favorite holiday.

"Let's get moving. We don't want to be late," I said, trying to keep my tone light. Jordis was fumbling the door handle as clumsily as she had been fumbling her coat buttons, so I opened it for her. "Have you considered putting on your mittens after getting ready?" I asked her.

"But then my hands would be cold when I went outside," she told me, her tone indicating that it was so obvious she shouldn't need to explain it. I just shook my head and chuckled, my smile feeling more real with every passing moment.

I finally managed to get the two of us bundled out the door, Pavot hot on my heels. It almost felt like wasted effort, since we were going all of twenty feet to get to Dagny's house-it was literally the next house over-but Skyrim's winters were serious business. This New Life Day was as overcast and full of snow as I could have expected, turning the normally beautiful streets of Solitude into a grey reflection. It made me think of Windhelm, my home city, and I felt a pang of melancholy that I tried to stamp down. New Life Day was supposed to be a happy day.

I knocked on the door, tensing myself in preparation of seeing Nelkir, but I should have guessed that he wouldn't be answering the door for callers. Instead, I found myself looking into the red eyes of Jarl Balgruuf's housecarl, Irileth. I smiled and nodded at her in greeting.

"Happy holidays," I said with real cheer.

"Happy holidays," she replied in her normal harsh tones. I had begun to understand that Irileth didn't actually hate me personally; I thought that maybe she just hated everyone who wasn't Jarl Balgruuf or his children, just to be safe.

"Happy New Life Day!" Jordis burbled, moving forward with her arms spread wide. Irileth took a step backward in surprise, her hand dropping to her sword.

"Hug me and lose a hand," she warned. Jordis' face drooped comically and I couldn't help but laugh as I patted her on the back in commiseration.

"May we come in?" I asked, summoning up all of my manners.

"Of course," Irileth responded. "You're expected." Her glare left no guess as to what I could have done with myself if I hadn't been specifically invited over. "Dagny is waiting for you upstairs. She said to send you up right away when you got here."

I nodded, somewhat surprised, and took off my overcoat before heading to the stairs. Dagny and Pavot milled about the foyer, drifting slowly toward the blazing fireplace under Irileth's watchful eye. I chuckled again and took the stairs two at a time up to Dagny's room. I had been here before, but never without Frothar on hand to act as a chaperone.

The door stood open a few inches, and I pushed it open and walked in without thinking. I managed to get two steps into the room before I realized that Dagny was naked from the waist up, her back turned to me. Below the waist, she was wearing only a filmy petticoat that stopped at her knees. My eyes roamed her bare calves and the curve of her shoulder while my mouth worked and I sputtered.

Gods, you would have thought I had never seen a naked woman before. Given how lax privacy had been back at Sanctuary and how public bathing was, I'd been exposed to nudity-male and female-more times than I could count. But this was the first time I'd seen Dagny this close to naked, and that made it somehow more forbidden, somehow more real.

"Close the door, would you?" she asked, barely turning her head toward me. "And close your mouth too. You're drawing flies." Her tone was sharp as usual but somehow playful, almost amused.

I pushed the door closed and turned my shoulder toward Dagny, not quite able to look away completely even though I knew it would be more courteous to do so. At least I was able to keep from openly staring at her.

"Happy New Life Day," I said lamely.

"Nothing happy about it if I can't hurry up and get ready," she responded, holding up one dress and then another with a critical eye. "This would be difficult enough already, even if Father hadn't given the help the day off. Something about 'holiday spirit' or somesuch nonsense. Do you know how hard it is to do my own hair without a maid's help?"

"I don't think you need any help to be pretty," I said without thinking about it.

Dagny turned toward me, smiling for real this time. My eyes darted down to her breasts before I could control them, and I was more than a little disappointed to discover that she had shrugged into a corset at some point while I was trying to not look at her.

"You're sweet," she said, patting me on the cheek, "but you don't get points for kissing my ass. That's only to be expected."

"But how about for kissing other things?" I asked, leaning toward her.

"No time for that," she chided, pushing me back. She turned away from me again. "Lace me up in the back. Make sure to make it tight. If I can breathe normally, it's too loose."

"I don't see the point of these things," I complained, even as my hands went to my designated task.

"You wouldn't," she said without looking back. "I mean, look what you're wearing now."

"What's wrong with these clothes?" I asked, feeling more than a little hurt. I had actually made a point of dressing nicer than usual, since I wanted to impress Dagny's father.

"For a diplomatic meeting?" she retorted. "It would be easier to list what's not wrong with them. Fortunately, I foresaw this possibility and picked out a few things for you the last time I was at the Radiant Raiment."

"Diplomatic what now?" I said, my hurt feelings turning swiftly to genuine confusion.

"Father will be heading out in a few moments with Irileth and Frothar," Dagny continued on, not seeming to hear my question. "Nelkir will most likely ride in their carriage, so we'll have one to ourselves, which would normally be scandalous but I assume my honor will be safe in the presence of the Dragonborn's son."

"Wait, wait!" I insisted. "That's supposed to be low-key."

"Aventus," she said, emphasizing my name in a way that made my cheeks burn and hackles raise, "it's a court function. Everyone there will already know."

"I still don't understand what's going on!" I protested.

"That's obvious," Dagny said with a sigh. She picked up two outfits, both in my size and both colored like a peacock having a wrestling match with a crazed painter. "Pick one out and get dressed. You can use the drawing room to change."

I took the one that was incrementally less garish and sighed. I still didn't understand what was going on, but it was generally better to go along with Dagny when she got like this than try to resist her.

New Life Day wasn't going at all like I expected.

The next hour was a whirlwind. Dagny made sure I was dressed "properly," and that my hair-always unruly, perpetually in need of being cut-was styled more smoothly than usual. I didn't even get to see Balgruuf or Frothar before they left, though I wasn't sad that I had missed Nelkir in all the rush.

Finally, Dagny and I piled into a carriage, with Jordis being condemned to the buckboard with the driver, since the interior was only big enough for two to sit comfortably. I would have happily crowded in for the warmth, but Dagny insisted that the two of us be alone. Any hope I had of pleasant distractions on the way to wherever we were going dissolved as Dagny continued to work on her makeup, arrange her hair, and generally act like I was out of my mind for thinking that New Life Day was meant to be an intimate affair with family and close friends.

"Holidays are just an excuse for a good party," she said as we approached the Thalmor Embassy.

"I wouldn't imagine the Thalmor like partying very much," I sulked. All I could think of was the black-clad torturers and murderers that Jarl Ulfric's people constantly warned about while I was growing up in Windhelm. The Thalmor were supposedly monsters, even for elves, who wanted nothing more than to drive the worship of Talos extinct. I didn't give a whit about Talos, of course, but the image of grim elven inquisitors was ingrained in my mind.

"The Thalmor host every few years, and it's their turn," Dagny explained. "With the civil war going on, they want to make a good show of support for the loyal jarls and their courts, so it's going to be particularly lavish. Father knows it will be a good opportunity to win support for his eventual campaign to retake Whiterun, so it's even more important than usual for us to be there."

"And for the Dragonborn's son to be seen siding with the Imperial loyalists?" I asked bitterly. "Is that really the only reason Jarl Balgruuf asked me along?"

"What other reason would there be?" Dagny asked, seeming to be genuinely confused by my questions. I turned away from her to keep her from seeing the hurt look on my face.

I didn't speak to her again until we had arrived at the Thalmor Embassy. She didn't seem to notice, which only made my foul mood deepen.

As the carriage pulled up to the main gates of the embassy, I looked out the windows. I was surprised to see a building that looked very much like a traditional Nord manor, surrounded by a low stone wall and with high-gabled roofs. The peaks of the roofs even had a tall wooden windbreak, something I had always thought looked sort of like a fish's fin. All in all, the buildings wouldn't have seemed out of place in Solitude itself-or in Windhelm for that matter.

The windows were a different story, though, and the one thing I found out of place in the structure. They were leaded glass, crosshatched with iron; they were opaque with color but also latticed enough to be secure against infiltration. I doubted that even Babette could have crawled in through a broken window panel, and lead glass was difficult to break without making tremendous amounts of noise.

Even if the buildings looked familiar, the occupants did not. While the carriages queued up to the main gate were disgorging mainly Nords and a few Imperials, the gates themselves were guarded by tall, imposing Altmer wearing golden armor. It gleamed even in the dim light of the gloomy day, and the elves wearing it had impassive faces, as though the cold were nothing to them. If I hadn't spent so much time with Garnag, I might have missed the faint shimmer of sorcery clinging to them; they must have been using magic to keep the cold at bay.

Garnag had once told me that the Altmer had the most magical potential of all the races of men and mer, and that virtually every member of their race-from the highest lord to the lowest soldier-learned at least some magic. I was seeing proof of it with my own eyes, and it was a little bit intimidating to say the least. Of course, that was probably the point; I had also heard the Altmer preferred to rule through fear whenever possible.

The carriage finally came to a stop, the door opened to reveal the wizened face of a Bosmer footman. This was something else I had heard about the High Elves; they preferred other, "lower" elves as servants, since it was unseemly to have an Altmer in a position of servitude. I stepped out first, remembering my etiquette, then turned to offer Dagny a hand out of the carriage. The footman placed a wooden step below the lip of the door, making it easier for her. I supposed that I should have waited for the step myself, but I was tall enough that I didn't see the point.

Dagny took my hand and gracefully descended from the carriage. I couldn't help but admire her then, despite my anger. She really did look like a princess.

The footman led us to the main doors, where another servant announced us to the room. A few heads turned, but "Lady Dagny of Whiterun and escort" didn't really call the sort of attention that I dreaded. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.

"Ah, Dagny, my girl!" boomed a voice from our left, and my blood went cold. "And Aventus, lad! It's good to see both of you, especially together."

"Thane Erikur," Dagny said politely, inclining her head to the overweight, gaudily dressed man as he walked toward us from the crowd. Part of me was pleased to see he was still limping from where Runa had put a knife in his leg many weeks back, but the rest of me was just unhappy to see him at all. "Happy New Life Day to you."

"And to you, child," he said beneficently, as though he were the cause for the holiday. He beamed widely at me and extended his hand. It took me just a second to remember to extend my own, but I don't think he noticed. I shook his greasy paw with all the dignity I could muster and nodded my head, trying not to speak. After all, the last time I had seen this man, I had been masked and threatening to kill him. It would be a little awkward if he recognized my voice now.

Somehow, we got through a round of small talk with Erikur without me doing much more than nodding along and occasionally doing my best fake laugh at his anecdotes. I knew that Dagny found the man just as repulsive and venal as I did, so I was vaguely amazed at how genuinely interested she seemed in his stories and jibes.

I might have been an assassin with a double life, but Dagny knew more about wearing a mask than I ever would.

When Erikur finally made his apologies and departed, I breathed a sigh of relief. "Are we going to have to do much more of that sort of thing?" I asked Dagny quietly.

"Of course," she responded nonchalantly. "We have to make a good impression, after all."

"This really isn't-"

"What you were expecting, I know," Dagny interrupted, her mask cracking with annoyance. "Well, what were you expecting, Aventus Aretino? Hot chocolate in front of a fire while my father told rousing stories? Holiday songs with Nelkir? I'm sorry if you're put out by the demands of our position, but you need to grow up."

"Grow up?" I asked dumbly, my cheeks flushing as I stepped away from her. I could feel my pulse beginning to race with anger. I kept my voice low and still, trying my best to avoid drawing attention to us more out of habit than because I actually cared what these people thought. "How dare you."

I felt foolish for being so angry, but at the same time I felt righteous. Dagny knew how I felt about these sort of things, and she had basically ambushed me with it. Now she had the gall to accuse me of being childish!

"It's true!" she hissed, pitching her own voice low but sharp. "You always act like we're just supposed to do what we want and damn whatever is expected of us, but that's not the way the real world works. We only maintain our position by having friends-and this is how we make those friends. I know you're not stupid, Aventus, but by the gods it pains me to have to explain this to you."

"I wouldn't know," I replied petulantly, feeling more like the child she had accused me of being with every passing moment. "After all, I'm just a commoner, right? Low-born and barely worth mentioning."

Dagny spared a look around the room, her honey-brown eyes darting back and forth. I realized that I had started to get a little too heated, that my voice was getting out of control. I straightened up and smoothed my gaudy clothes with as much dignity as I could muster.

"I'm going to get some punch," I said calmly. "Would you care for anything?"

What I didn't say was, "I'm mad at you, and I need to get away for a little while."

"No thank you," Dagny said, her voice even and level.

What she didn't say was, "You're being childish. Don't come back until you can act like an adult."

She was outwardly calm, but I could see heat blossoms on her cheeks. Part of me felt triumphant that I had managed to disturb her mask enough that her real emotions showed through, as though I had scored a point in some wicked game. Part of me was angry at myself for making her upset, but it was being drowned out by my wounded pride.

Maybe things would have gone differently if I had listened to that part of myself-the better part, the part that cared for Dagny more than it cared for my stupid, selfish pride.

But I didn't. And the rest of the day went right to hell because of it.

I spent most of the morning hovering near the punch bowl, completely ignoring Dagny's lessons. She had emphasized the importance of movement in these sort of situations, about how a person should be standing still only when part of a conversation or during very brief breaks for refreshment. "Only unimportant people can afford to stand still," she had told me once.

Well, at the moment I was feeling pretty damned unimportant.

I chatted tersely with the various dignitaries and guests who wandered by, but my chilly tone rapidly sent them on their way. Most of them didn't seem to know who I was beyond Dagny's escort, and their probing questions annoyed me. At least Erikur had been right about one thing: only a few people in Solitude's court knew that I was the Dragonborn's son, and the secret hadn't spread far beyond their circle yet. I appreciated that even loose-lipped courtiers knew the value of a well-held secret.

I didn't realize how strong Altmer punch was, or I might have taken it a bit slower. As it was, all I was tasting was fruit and the faintest hint of liquor, but I was rapidly mainlining very strong booze with nothing more than a few shrimp puffs and vegetable slices to bolster my stomach against it.

My attitude began to slide from chilly to surly as I got drunker, and by noon I was probably at least as annoying as Erikur. Certainly, I was getting more dirty looks than he tended to, even behind his back. The part of me that was still angry at Dagny-and it wasn't an insignificant part-reveled in the nasty looks and whispers I was getting from the courtiers and their retinue.

"Sir, I think you've had enough," finally came a voice from behind me. I didn't know the speaker, but I knew the tone. Hadn't I heard that same phrase directed at Nelkir any number of times during our day out? Thinking of Nelkir pushed my mood right from surly to genuinely pissed off, and I rounded on the speaker ready to start a fight.

The sight that was waiting for me made me think twice. Standing a few feet from me was a High Elf dressed in the gold armor of a Thalmor warrior. They had looked imposing outside the embassy, but standing this close, he was downright menacing. I was tall for an Imperial-tall enough to sometimes be mistaken for a Nord-but this Altmer towered head and shoulders over me, though he was probably no heavier than me. His willowy limbs didn't seem weak, though, and wearing that plate armor of his surely meant he had real muscles underneath.

The palpable aura of intimidation rolling off him cut right through my booze-induced haze, and I realized that he was using some sort of low-grade fear magic on me. I didn't appreciate being bullied at the best of times, certainly not by some jumped-up guard with delusions of grandeur. Deep inside, I was counting the number of ways I could kill him before he could even draw his weapon-but I realized that none of them would make his death unnoticed by the crowd that filled the main hall all around us.

"And what if I say I haven't?" I asked, narrowing my eyes. I knew how petulant it sounded even as I said it, but I would be damned if I just rolled over for anyone who came along, thinking they could order me around.

"You should come with me, sir," the guard said, ignoring my question. "I'll take you to a back room, where you can get some space to clear your head." He started to hold out a hand to gesture me in the right direction.

"You don't want to touch me," I growled as his hand hovered near my shoulder. His impassive face finally showed some emotion as his lip quirked up in a sneer.

"No," he agreed. "I certainly don't."

Something in his disgusted look pushed me over the edge. I tensed my shoulders and bunched my fists, ready to throw caution to the wind and teach this pointy-eared bastard a lesson. Before I could carry through, something in my stance must have given me away; I have no doubt that I was advertising my intent from a mile off. The guard took a quick step back from me and flicked his eyes over my shoulder, nodding very slightly.

I took it for a ruse-right up until the feeling of every nerve in my body locking in place hit me like a boulder from a catapult.

Suddenly, I couldn't move a muscle. My whole body felt unaccountably heavy, and I would have toppled to the ground if I hadn't also become paradoxically weightless. I realized that I was hovering in place, my feet an inch or so off the ground, while I was too paralyzed to even blink. A Bosmer servant materialized out of the corner of my eye, taking my elbow while the guard in front of me turned and led the way out of the main hall. I could hear footsteps behind me, probably the spellcaster who had paralyzed me, but I could no more turn to look at him than I could have been expected to drink the Sea of Ghosts dry.

Within moments, they had ushered me out of the dining hall and into a back room without anyone being the wiser. If they had been intending to kill me, I would have met a gruesome end within moments. Even the Dark Brotherhood could learn some lessons about "disappearing" a person from the Thalmor, I think.

Fortunately for me, they were only interested in getting me out of the public eye before I could humiliate myself-or bring shame to the embassy by letting me make a scene. The Bosmer deposited me in a sitting room, propping me up against a high-backed, overstuffed chair; a minute or so later, when my muscles finally relaxed, I sank into it with barely a thump against my backside. It occurred to me that they must have had to do this sort of thing before-and then it occurred to me that, given the very long life spans of High Elves, perhaps they had done it a great many times before.

The Altmer guard dropped back to the door while the Bosmer servant crouched next to me. He poured a cup of water from a pitcher on the end table next to my chair and offered it to me.

"You should drink," he said, not unkindly, when I paused before taking it. "Paralysis leaves you dehydrated-that and the alcohol, I mean."

I had seriously been considering throwing the cup across the room, but looking into the wizened brown face of the mer before me, I realized that none of this was his fault. Punishing him for my own bad behavior and the Altmers' reactions to it would be counterproductive. Finally, I took the glass and sipped from it, nodding my thanks.

"Good, good," he said as I drained my second cup of water. The Bosmer looked back at the guard and nodded to him. "I don't think he'll be any trouble now, yes?" I nodded vigorously, trying very hard not to look daggers at the Thalmor guard.

"He can come back out to the main hall when he's sobered up," the Altmer responded, looking at the servant and not me. I realized that, to a Thalmor, even a lowly house servant was better than me. To him, humans were lower than slaves. "Make sure he's sober when you send him out, or it's your skin."

"Of course," the Bosmer said, nodding in agreement. When the Thalmor was gone, he turned to me, his eyes turning disapproving but still sympathetic. "You seem a bit out of place here, young master, if you don't mind me saying so."

"You're not wrong," I told him, wetting my fingers from the bottom of the cup and rubbing them against my eyes. "I came here with my…" I paused; what was Dagny to me? "With a girl," I finally managed to conclude, sounding lame even to my own ears.

"Came with two, as I recall," he replied, and I suddenly recognized him as the footman who I had met outside earlier. "Both Nords, both pretty-for humans."

"The other one is my housecarl," I told him. He looked me up and down again, assessing.

"I thought you were an Imperial," he said.

"I am," I interrupted, knowing what was coming next. "My family is here in Skyrim, though, and my mother…" I trailed off again, not knowing what to say about Hecate to an elf. She had never seemed to care much for the Thalmor, and I didn't want to risk giving information to people she might consider enemies.

"Your mother became important suddenly," he concluded, nodding to himself. "That sort of thing's happened quite a lot lately, thanks to this local unpleasantness." I nodded after realizing he was talking about the civil war. I supposed that the whole thing probably seemed terribly provincial to people from the mighty Aldmeri Dominion.

"Thank you for the water," I told him, feeling more like myself. "It was very kind of you."

"Just doing my job," he said, standing up and brushing his servant's livery as though it might have acquired a layer of dust in the few minutes he was helping me. He turned and started walking toward the door, then paused a moment, as though trying to make a decision. He finally turned back to me. "Might I speak freely, sir?"

"Of course," I said. The idea that people might not speak freely was stranger to me than the other way, honestly.

"The mighty rarely consider the feelings of the meek," he told me. "If you intend to pursue this life, you may wish to consider growing thicker skin. It will serve you well in the long run." Then, feeling that he had perhaps said too much, he turned smartly upon his heel and left.

I sat in the drawing room for a few long minutes, feeling terrible sobriety creeping in around the edges and bringing with it a powerful melancholy. I felt like a fool; I had gotten drunk in public, gotten blindsided by a common guard, and been saved from humiliation only by virtue of my hosts wanting to spare themselves from shame.

Dagny was angry at me, and she wasn't exactly wrong to be… but at the same time, I felt put upon. Who was she to tell me how to live my life? I had been living the life I wanted to live for years, up until I came to Solitude. Now, everything seemed so complicated and murky.

What good was my life if I wasn't doing the things I wanted to do?

I thought about it for a few moments longer before I realized something. I had come here with two women, but I'd only made time for one of them. Dagny was so demanding that I hadn't even seen Jordis since we had arrived at the embassy. If Dagny was angry at me, I should go spend some time with my friend instead of just feeling sorry for myself. At least Jordis didn't expect me to be someone I wasn't.

It took me a while to find a servant who wasn't in a hurry and who was willing to answer questions. Finally, a Dunmer maid was able to direct me toward a small secondary dining hall down several twists and turns from the main hall. The door was unmarked and out of the way; I frowned when I saw it, because I should have expected it when I had gotten here. The glamour and beauty of the embassy, the bright colors of the courtiers, and the imposing armor of the guards had all distracted me from the truth.

Dagny might be able to say that "housecarls are like family," but they got sent to eat with the servants nonetheless.

I pushed open the door to a dull and cheerless room with a low-burning hearth. A dozen or so men and women were sitting around three tables, food and drink of far lower quality than that served in the main hall sitting on platters between them. Most of them looked up when I walked in the room, and a few dropped their hands to their weapons by instinct, but I ignored them all to find the one I was looking for.

Jordis sat alone at a table far from the fireplace, her face disconsolate as she toyed with half of a sweetroll on a plate. Her expression was gloomy and forlorn, but she was still wearing her heavy plate, making her look like a child wearing her mother's armor. I walked across the room, ignoring the eyes of the other housecarls and servants, and sat down across from her.

"Happy New Life Day, Jordis," I said with a smile.

She looked up, seeming surprised to see me.

"Happy New Life Day, Aventus," she replied automatically. "What are you doing back here? Is the ball over?"

"Not yet," I said nonchalantly, reaching across and grabbing the rest of her uneaten sweetroll. I picked off pieces and ate them quickly, savoring the taste of real food, even if it was cold. Now that I was sobering up, I was viciously hungry.

Jordis got a suspicious look on her face and leaned forward, sniffing. "You've been drinking!" she whispered emphatically. "Your mother will be so mad at me!"

"I won't tell her if you won't," I responded, knowing that Hecate wouldn't give two figs about me drinking as long as I didn't jeopardize the Brotherhood while doing it. I gave Jordis a weak smile, and she gave me a more sincere one back.

"What are you doing?" she asked again.

"Where's Irileth?" I asked in return, ignoring her question. I hadn't noticed the red-eyed Dunmer among the people back here.

"With Jarl Balgruuf, of course," she said. "All the jarls keep their housecarls with them all the time at things like this. The rest of us have to stay out of sight to avoid insulting the Altmer. It's like… I guess if we were all out there, it would be like saying the Thalmor can't be trusted to protect their guests."

"That makes sense," I said. "We're leaving."

"Wait, what?" she said as I reached across the table and grabbed her hand.

"Get your things," I said again, looking her in the eyes. "We're going."

"But Aventus-" she started, then quickly grabbed her cloak off the hook by the door as I started half-dragging her out of the room. Some of the housecarls were snickering at the sight of a teenaged boy dressed like a drunken peacock dragging a grown, armored woman around like a rag doll, but most had the good grace to just start studying their mugs and plates.

"I'm sick of this place, and I'm sick of these phonies," I told Jordis after we got out into the hall. "We'll take the carriage back to Solitude, then send it back for Dagny."

"Aventus, stop," Jordis said, pulling her hand free from mine and stopping dead in the hall. "Why are you doing this?"

"I'm sick of trying to pretend to be something I'm not," I told her, feeling my face sag. I was struggling to keep my voice level, and I hated how whiny I sounded. "I wanted to spend a nice New Life Day with you and Dagny and her family, and instead I got hijacked along for this… this debacle! I just want to go home."

"You're not pretending to be anything," Jordis said, reaching out to smooth my hair back from my forehead. It was a motherly gesture, and it almost sent me over the edge into tears. "You're a fine lad with an important family, and important people do important things. Honestly, I'm just happy to be brought along."

"Wait," I said, confused. "You knew this is what we would be doing?"

"Well, yeah," she said, shrugging. "Someone important like Jarl Balgruuf can't just spend a holiday at home. He has to go out and do things with other important people. Important people like you, Aventus."

"What about you then?" I asked her, my heart clenched in the fist of a deep and painful anxiety. "It's not fair to invite you and then stick you in with the servants!"

"I am a servant," she said plainly. "There's nothing shameful about it. I serve your mother-and I serve you, Aventus Aretino. Maybe you don't understand it, but that's the way it is. And truly, I'm just happy to be invited-to feel like people want me around. I'm so used to getting told that no one needs me… It just makes me happy to get to do my job."

"You didn't seem too happy back there," I told her, jerking my thumb in the direction of the servant's hall.

"Oh, that?" she asked, bringing up her index finger to her lip and chewing on it slightly. "I was just thinking really hard about the food that must be out in the dining hall. Shrimp puffs and chilled fruit and those little sausages…" She trailed off, a wistful look in her eyes. "All the good food goes to the important people. I was just sad about that, was all."

"I'm not important," I insisted. "I'm no one special."

"Of course you are," she replied, sterner than I was used to hearing from the meek housecarl. "Anyone who meets you can tell, Aventus. You're going to do great things someday. And that doesn't have anything to do with your mother, or your girlfriend, or her father. It's you."

I finally couldn't take it anymore and just broke down crying. My shoulders heaved and tears ran down my face while Jordis awkwardly hugged me as best she could while wearing plate armor. Her face was so stricken when I looked at her that I burst out laughing in the middle of crying. She smiled wanly, clearly confused what she should be feeling right now.

"Thanks for that, Jordis," I told her, wiping my eyes with a handkerchief.

"You should get back to Dagny before you're missed," she said. "And don't worry about me, Aventus. I'll be fine."

"Just to make sure about that, I'll be spending tonight at Proudspire Manor," I told her. "We're going to drink hot chocolate and sing songs and roast chestnuts until I'm absolutely sure you're good and sick of it." She smiled brilliantly and hugged me again, hitting me in the throat with one of her pauldrons. Then she turned and skipped away, her armor jingling with every movement.

"Happy New Life Day, Jordis," I whispered, rubbing my hand against my throat where she had hit me. "Happy New Life Day to me too."

What Jordis had said stuck with me, and it made me come to some important decisions that I had been putting off for a while. I couldn't just leave things as they were forever, letting others make decisions for me. I had given up too much-done too many things-to not live my own life the way I wanted to live it. I realized I needed to talk to Dagny.

I just hoped it wouldn't be for the last time.

"I see you're back," Dagny said when I found her again, her tone cold and unconcerned. I tried to discern whether or not she had any real feeling for me under it, but her mask was back in place and as impervious as ever.

Impetuously, I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She started suddenly, looking around at the assembled courtiers as though I had reached out and goosed her nipple in public.

"What are you doing?" she hissed. "That's not proper! We're not even engaged yet!"

"I don't care about proper," I told her, shaking my head. "I care about you a lot, Dagny, daughter of Balgruuf-maybe even love you. But that's not enough." She seemed even more shocked at this, her mask cracking and her eyes becoming almost wild.

"What are you saying, Aventus?" she asked me.

"I'm saying that I can't stay with someone who thinks I'm not good enough for her," I said plainly. She started to say something, but I held up a hand to interrupt her. "Every time I'm with you, you make me feel like I'm less than you because I'm not highborn. I think you genuinely care about me too-otherwise you wouldn't have done so much for me. But I can't live like that."

"Aventus…" she said, her eyes steeling and her mouth setting into a pout.

"Let me finish," I insisted. "I'm not going to shame you by abandoning you at a fancy party, but after today, I'm done. If you can't start treating me as an equal, don't treat me like anything at all. I care about you too much to want to hurt you-but I've got too much self-respect to let you keep hurting me."

"Why now?" she asked, her voice remarkably composed. "Why would you say this to me now?"

"It's New Life Day," I finally said after a few moments. "It's a time for new beginnings." I took her hand gently and kissed the back of her fingers. "I'd like a new beginning with you, if you can give me that." I let her hand go and stepped back, putting a proper distance between us. "If not… I understand."

Dagny curled her hand up to her chest and paused, seeming to think about it. Just then, the music picked back up, and she held her hand out to me.

"Dance with me," she said. It wasn't a promise.

"Of course, my lady," I replied. It wasn't a demand.

We danced, we chatted, and we mingled, until dark came early, as darkness comes in midwinter. All of it was proper as could be, and as empty. When the time finally came to go home, we rode back to Solitude in silence, both of us consumed with our thoughts.

Was this how a relationship ended, I wondered? Not with a bang, but with a whimper?

I wanted to take it all back, to say that I'd do anything Dagny wanted if only she'd stay with me, but my self-respect-and my stubborn pride-won out in the end. I knew that ultimately, I couldn't stay with someone who couldn't respect me. The burden was on her now, and I tried to reach some kind of peace with the idea that she wouldn't choose me in the end.

After all, she had her own pride to think of, the pride of a princess. And what was a lowly commoner boy to that?

I couldn't help but believe that it was nothing at all, no matter what Jordis might think.

...to be continued...


	13. The Wild Hunt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the wake of Aventus and Dagny's breakup, the littlest assassin takes a hard look at his life as he continue to search for the elusive Demon Masked Killer.

Chapter 13: The Wild Hunt

 

Chasing prey was always exhilarating.

My blood pumped in my veins, my breath puffing coldly into the chill Solitude night. The moons hung overhead in the starry blackness, neither of them full but still bright enough to turn the city into a patchwork of shadows and real darkness. Someone less used to the night might only see black on black, but I could see greys and whites and deep blues, all of it shading toward red around the edges of my sight.

I saw my target again, ducking between one chimney and the next. If I had been a second slower behind, I would have lost track entirely. I grinned beneath my cowl and picked up the pace, pushing my body until my limbs burned and my breath sizzled in my chest. Even at my best pace, my feet were whispers on the tiled rooftops; the people sleeping under me would hear no more from my frenzied chase than they would from a family of pigeons turning over in their nests.

All at once, my prey noticed me, more sensing my presence than seeing or hearing me. It made sense; skilled killers could often feel each other's murderous intent long before they laid eyes on one another, or so Nazir had told me once. I wasn't sure that was a talent I would ever have, though. For me, killing intent was more normal than peace.

After all, I had been raised by murderers. My adopted mother is the leader of the Dark Brotherhood. How could I not know death more intimately than life?

My prey gave up all pretense of stealth, putting on speed to widen the gap between us, hoping to outpace me since hiding was no longer an option. If anything, my grin became wider. I had run with an ice wolf across the open plains. Did this fool really think escape through mere speed was an option?

The chase seemed ended. The roof ahead gave way to open space with a gap of better than twenty feet between the end of one eaves and the beginning of the next. My prey did the unexpected, though, and put on a sudden burst of speed before leaping into the open air. I saw feet churning in space, like running on nothing, before a puff of snow and a rolling landing made me realize I had been holding my breath, convinced that the leap would end with a bone-crunching fall instead.

She wanted to play it this way? Fine then.

I pushed myself to the absolute limit, waited until the last possible second to make my jump. My heart seized in my chest as I hit the apex of my leap. Even as I felt the absolute terror of knowing I was going to fall short, I was still thrilled. I was alive in a way I had forgotten I could be.

For at least another few seconds, anyway.

As I pinwheeled my arms, trying to gain as much distance as I could, my prey turned and leapt for the edge of the roof. She stuck out both hands, crossed at the wrists to brace them, and caught my extended arms at the moment they crossed her field of vision. She twisted to the side, bleeding my momentum and turning my fall into a neat, reversed arc. I swung my legs to aid her, bringing myself back up over the edge of the gutter and landing in a heavy heap beside my prey, my savior.

"Oof!" I grunted as I landed on my side, my wrists and forearms burning from the effort of my acrobatic maneuver.

"What in Oblivion were you thinking?" Runa asked as she rolled over next to me. "Following me like that could have killed you!"

"Thought I could make the jump," I said simply. Actually, I hadn't. I just hadn't cared if I missed or not.

"You've got forty pounds on me," she replied, pulling back my cowl and hood to look me in the eyes as she berated me. "I made the jump because I'm lighter."

"Thirty pounds," I said with a smile. "Maybe thirty pounds."

"Are you calling me fat?" she asked with a sharp smile of her own. "Or maybe you like that. I seem to recall what's-her-face being a chubby lump."

"Don't talk about Dagny," I said sharply, my smile melting away in a heartbeat.

"Poor baby," Runa teased. "Fine then. Let's not talk anymore."

When she pressed her mouth to mine with a force that was almost painful, I could almost recapture that sensation of freedom that falling through empty space had given me.

 

***

 

I was walking the streets of Solitude on a clear, cold day when I nearly committed murder.

The snow had been shoveled from the majority of walks and streets, but the crisp chill in the air was still keeping most people indoors. I liked days like this-not so much the cold as the emptiness. The city certainly lived up to its name today. Most of the time I feared the quiet, so much like the lonely terrors of my childhood, but it was appealing every now and again. When I couldn't find solace in my own heart, the quiet white of the snow-covered city seemed to dampen the embers that burned within me.

"Aretino!" called a familiar voice from behind me. I heard the crunch of booted feet on snow, the twist of ankles locking in a way that meant a blow was coming. After all the times he had managed to slap me on the back without warning, it was almost humorous to think he would warn me before actually hitting me.

I could have disabled my would-be attacker in a dozen ways. Even without looking, I could tell his stance was sloppy. He had cried out to me before attacking; that meant he wanted to look into my eyes when he struck. That sort of forewarning was the mark of a rank amateur. A real killer never gave any sign of his intent before striking. It took everything in me to just turn around like one of the common sheep I was pretending to be-to not dismantle my attacker before he could say another word. I saw it play out in my mind, felt his bones breaking under my grip, felt his nose break from my counter-strike.

The barely-restrained violence in my heart had been less restrained than usual since the silent carriage ride home after New Life Day. Dagny had said nothing to me on the trip back from the ball, murmured only polite words as I exited the carriage that were less than nothing when we arrived back in Solitude. It had been more than a week since I had last seen her, and the knowledge that our relationship was over weighed in my stomach like an undigested stone.

I pushed the anger from my face, made it as blank and stupid as I could before the blow came. My assassin-trained reflexes let me roll with the blow that might have broken my nose if I had taken it badly. I caught it on my jaw instead, snapping my head back and rolling on my heels dramatically to tumble into a convenient snowbank. I would sport a nasty bruise later, but the physical pain was worth the cold blackness that silenced everything inside me. The trained killer in me ached to shed blood; I chained and leashed it as I looked up at my attacker.

"Good morning to you too, Frothar," I said mildly, rubbing my jaw. Jarl Balgruuf's eldest son stood over me, his fists balled up and his face tight. His whole demeanor said that he intended to beat me if I gave him cause, but that he was hardly committed to violence. He was flexing his right hand as though hitting me had bruised his delicate knuckles. I fought the urge to smirk at his discomfort.

"Aventus," he said, nodding at me but not dropping his fists.

"Are you going to hit me again, or can I at least stand up first?" I asked him, again with no more emotion than asking if he could pass me the salt.

"A true Nord would never hit a man while he was down," he responded, almost automatically.

"And I suppose yelling at me was to keep it from being a dishonorable sneak attack?" I asked, pulling myself into a sitting posture and brushing the snow from my sleeves. I looked up from my efforts and gave him a carefully planned half-smile. Look at how charming I can be! that smile said. No hard feelings, old friend!

"Naturally," he said with a half-smile of his own, finally dropping his fists and offering me a hand up.

That was my moment.

I saw it all play out in my mind, a perfect kill. I would take his hand and let him help me to my feet. My other hand would pull the knife from my boot. I would use the momentum to drive it home, stabbing him in the chest between the third and fourth ribs. The blade would pierce his heart and he would die before he could speak a word. Frothar Balgruufson would die with my face as the last thing he saw.

It took me a moment to realize that I was already reaching for my knife as I took his hand. I looked down and forced myself to take a moment. What was I doing? Frothar was neither my prey nor a serious threat. He was a boy barely older than me who had never taken a life-as close to innocent as anyone in this world could be expected to be. Certainly more innocent than I had been for years.

I put both of my hands on my knees and breathed heavily. I was suddenly dizzy, less from the blow and the fall than from the killing intent leaving me in an almost physical rush. The quiet blackness shattered, leaving behind just Aventus Aretino, a teenaged boy whose hair was always too long, who always felt shabby no matter what he wore. Frothar, not knowing how close he had just come to death, clapped me on the back.

"I didn't hit you that hard, did I?" he asked. The note of solicitousness in his voice shamed me.

"Well, I wasn't expecting to be hit this morning," I told him. "Usually, if I'm going to be punched in the face, it happens after lunch." He laughed and I joined him, trying to get back the equilibrium that I had lost so suddenly.

"Sorry about that," he said. His face turned serious again and he frowned at me. "You had it coming, though."

"Did I?" I asked. I couldn't work up too much indignity. I had much worse coming to me, if I were being honest about it.

"Dagny's been sulking in her room since New Life Day," he told me. "She barely comes out except for meals, and she barely touches her food." I groaned and tottered to a nearby bench. Someone had helpfully cleaned it off already, so I sank onto it, running my gloved fingers through my hair. "I asked her if something had happened between you two, but all she did was burst into tears and run off."

"Frothar, I-" I started, but he cut me off before I could get another word out.

"Aventus, if you've shamed my sister in any way…" He trailed off and balled up his fists, clearly beginning to remember that he was supposed to be angry at me. I sighed and looked up at him. Frothar was not the sort of person for whom anger-any strong emotion, really-came easily, so it was hard for him to hold onto it for long.

"We broke up," I told him. I thought about it for a moment and decided to be as honest as I could. It might earn me another punch, but Frothar didn't have it in him to be seriously violent. "Truth be told, I broke up with her. I didn't like the way she treated me, and I told her as much."

Frothar paused, frowning in thought, then opened his fists and sat down next to me.

"Well, thank goodness," he said, then looked at me with wide eyes. "Not that you broke up, I mean. Just that it wasn't anything more serious." He ran a hand through his long brown hair and tried again. "With how she was acting, I was worried that, well… You know."

"No, Frothar," I told him. "I don't know." Part of me was enjoying watching him squirm around the idea of accusing me of sleeping with his sister, but I mostly just felt bad about the whole situation. "I still like Dagny. A lot, really. But I'm not going to let her push me around like a stable boy just because I like her."

"That's just how Dagny is," he replied, coming to her defense. "She doesn't mean anything by it."

"Maybe not," I said, nodding, "but it sure feels like she does. I told her that she had to learn how to treat me with respect or we were over. I'm sorry that she's upset. It wasn't my intention to hurt her."

"Even though she's hurt you?" he asked, glancing at me as though the question were casual.

"I would never want to hurt Dagny," I said, surprised at the hot tears that welled up in my eyes. "She means too much to me."

"Then apologize, for the love of the Eight!" Frothar said, throwing his hands to the sky as though he expected the gods to appear and back him up.

"I didn't do anything wrong!" I stood up and turned to face him.

"Do you think that actually matters?" he asked. He crossed his arms as though lecturing to a child. "Apologies aren't about right and wrong. They're about moving past the argument. Anger can't end unless someone takes the blame."

"And you came here to put the blame on me?" My face was turning red now, and I could feel my voice scaling up. "Because your sister can't possibly be responsible for anything, right?"

"I came here to make you take responsibility for my sister's pain," he growled, coming to his feet again. Anger might not have been natural for Frothar, but he was still a Nord-less passionate than some of his folk, but only by a matter of degrees. "I feel responsible for this situation, at least a bit. I pushed you together, after all." He paused for a moment, and I thought about that day months ago-Divines, was it only months?-when the two of us had run side by side like old friends, though we had just met. "And whether you meant to or not, Aventus, you hurt her! My sister has a good heart, and she clearly cares about you. Honor her love, swallow your pride, and apologize."

"Frothar, if I apologize now, I'll be doing it for the rest of our relationship. I can't spend my whole life saying 'I'm sorry' for things I didn't do."

"More's the pity then," he said, turning away from me. Before he left, he paused, looking at me over his shoulder. "You should reconsider, Aventus. After all, you've clearly thought about spending the rest of your life with my sister. Is your pride worth throwing that away?"

As he walked away, I felt the stone in my belly grow heavier and colder. The winter day no longer felt as clear to me. A shadow seemed to hang over my heart now, if not over the city itself. He was right in a way that he couldn't have known. I had thought about a life with Dagny-a life outside the Dark Brotherhood. Now, with that spoiled, all that was left was the killer in me, hungering for death. It had nearly taken Frothar's life before I could restrain it.

I had almost let my mask slip during our very first conversation; this time, the slip had almost been fatal. My mask was getting harder and harder to keep in place. This wasn't just the boredom that had motivated me into my quest to find Finn's Lute, but something deeper and more painful. I needed something to channel my bloodlust, something to focus it on.

Running through my options, the demon-masked killer was my logical choice. He had haunted my thoughts for some time, but I had put him off because of my studies… and because of Dagny, I had to admit. I had let my interest slip away. Perhaps it was time to return to that interest, to turn my bloodlust against someone worthy of it.

If I was going to go hunting, I would need backup-and I had already managed to recruit someone very useful to help me. All that was left was to reach out and let her know that it was time...

 

***

 

"Did you enjoy your reward?" Runa asked when she finally broke our kiss.

"I'm beginning to wonder who was rewarding whom, honestly," I responded. "These chases always seem to end the same way, no matter which of us wins."

Runa smiled and leaned back from me, dusting snow from my shoulders. She leaned over and casually ruffled Pavot's ears, a gesture which elicited only a brief ruff of contentment from the massive ice wolf. She was one of the few people who could get away with treating the two-hundred-pound predator with such casual closeness.

"I'm still mad at you for that stupid chance you took on the jump," she said.

"And I'm still mad at you for bringing up Dagny," I told her before leaning in to press my mouth against hers again. We stayed like that for over a minute, breathing each other's warmth, before we finally broke apart.

"At least we know where we stand," she said with a knife-edged smirk.

"Where we stand is that we've been doing night patrols for three days without a sign of our real prey," I complained. Runa looked at me sharply and I held up my hands in a sign of warding. "Not that I mind having someone to… um… train with." She smiled again and I relaxed by a tiny fraction.

"You've been through too many near-death experiences over the last year," she said, standing up and dusting snow off of her leather pants. I had managed to fill Runa in on a heavily-edited version of events I had been through since I had left Honorhall more than four years ago. "You've got to build up your strength and stamina again. And your hand-to-hand skills are frankly a mess."

"You're not the first person to tell me that," I allowed, grudgingly.

"Well, if you get tired of chasing me across rooftops and sparring in alleys, I can always think of much more fun ways to build your stamina and test your grappling skills." She leered at me in a way that made me feel like a piece of meat and laughed at my obvious discomfort.

Why did I keep getting involved with women that were only happy when they were winding me up?

"We'll keep going out nights and searching until we find him," I said.

"Or until you have to go back to school next week," Runa teased. "Then I'm pretty much on my own looking for this 'Demon Mask' of yours."

"Don't even think about hunting him on your own," I growled at her. "He's a dangerous lunatic with a magic sword who makes a habit of killing women."

"And don't think you can tell me what to do, Aventus Aretino," she replied in a harsh voice. "You might have asked for my help with this mess, but I'll give it how I see fit."

"I just don't want you hurt," I said, turning away to look out across the snow-covered rooftops.

"That's sweet," Runa told me, patting me on the cheek like a child. "Stupid, but sweet."

"I guess that's me in a nutshell," I murmured.

"At least you're smart enough to recognize it," she replied. "That's more intelligent than most men ever become."

"Well, then," I told her, pulling my cowl up to cover the lower half of my face against the freezing wind, "I guess I'll have to take that as a compliment."

"It was intended as one," she smirked at me before taking off across the roofs once more. I followed her at a regular pace, in my element once more. The hunt was on again.

But I couldn't help but feel that shadow on my heart. It whispered to me that the whole time Runa had been kissing me, it was Dagny that I had been thinking about...


End file.
